Portainer for Edge Compute

Whilst containers have been a game changer in data centre environments, they are having an equally profound effect at the edge; but what is edge compute, and why are containers relevant there? Edge compute is an architecture where compute and storage resources are decentralized and distributed. There are almost endless use cases - for example it could mean compute environments are distributed all over the globe, located on every oil rig owned by an oil company or put into every truck in a fleet of food delivery vehicles.

The goal of edge compute is to minimize the amount of raw, unprocessed data sent to/from applications operating at edge locations (think CCTV cameras, or digital signage) and to reduce the time it takes for instructions to be sent from a central server to devices located at the edge. In an edge environment you can have sensors and devices talking directly to applications running on the network, with the application processing information in real time. However, the moment you decentralize your infrastructure and distribute your applications into containers at the edge, you need a simple way to manage the containers. This is where the Portainer Edge Compute features come in to play.

Portainer lets you manage your remote edge compute devices from a single centralized instance. From that one instance you can deploy applications into containers wherever they might be running. Specifically for Edge environments, Portainer allows endpoints to be grouped based on user defined criteria (using tags) and batch deploy applications to groups of devices in a "push" manner. The push deploy mechanism inside Portainer is aware devices may not be online/connected and thus has the ability to queue tasks until devices appear on the network. The ability to deploy of applications to groups of endpoints is only possible with container technology.