Edge devices are everywhere. Industries such as retail, energy, manufacturing, healthcare and transportation rely heavily on edge devices like self-service kiosks, industrial equipment, smart cameras, field computers and servers etc. for their day-to-day operations. Extensive proliferation across verticals is also accompanied by increasing complexity, along with its own horde of challenges.
The Complexities of Edge Devices
- Deployments may fail unexpectedly due to network latency, bandwidth limitations or environmental factors.
- Managing the distribution, security and auditing of software is a challenging task. The complexity increases exponentially when dealing with diverse devices, connectivity and physical security standards across a global landscape.
- Allocating a significant portion of IT staff to deploy and resolve configuration issues is necessary. However, at the edge, this can be particularly challenging as latency is critical and IT resources are scarce and expensive.
- Dealing with the aftermath of a cyberattack that exposes credit card or personal information due to misconfiguration issues is a serious concern.
- Having limited visibility into the status of deployed applications can lead to unknown or unplanned modifications on various devices in remote locations, resulting in an inundation of help desk calls.
Given these complexities, organizations can rely on Progress Chef Edge Management for these five reasons:
1. Flexible deployments to any device, anywhere. Manage rollbacks easily whenever required.
Progress Chef Edge Management is the perfect solution for reliable and scaled enterprise deployments. It allows you to enable consistent, reliable and secure deployments in production—even at a massive scale—using immutable artifacts with all the dependencies, configurations and preconditions bundled together.
In the case of problematic deployments like above, you can easily roll back to the previous version in a matter of minutes without having to send your IT staff to the field to perform a manual rollback. The lightweight nature of the artifacts makes them more accessible to download and run even on devices that have limited internet connectivity and disk space.
2. Reduce testing efforts with reproducible, portable and immutable artifacts
Reduce testing efforts by including all build and runtime dependencies of the application while packaging. It allows you to build, package, deploy and manage applications and services without worrying about which infrastructure your application will deploy on, and without any rewriting or refactoring if you switch to a different infrastructure. Bundled artifacts that are reproducible, portable and immutable are capable of consistently running in any environment.
3. Peer-to-peer communication within the network
With Chef Edge Management, users can leverage peer-to-peer communication, where there is simplified data transfer between the connected nodes without depending on a central server. Supervisors typically run in a network, which is often referred to as a ring. The ring can be large and contain hundreds or thousands of supervisors. Every node in the ring has a supervisor. Each supervisor exchanges and acts upon information provided by other supervisors to which it is connected—even in air gap scenarios.
4. Automate configuration changes with Policy as Code
Streamline configuration management across your entire edge device ecosystem with Chef’s standardized framework for development, security and operations, all while increasing the rate at which new features are released. Chef’s Policy-as-Code approach provides scalable, testable and consistent artifacts that can be used to automate infrastructure configuration, compliance and application delivery quickly, securely and with consistency across the entire heterogeneous IT fleet.
5. Continuous compliance and security at the edge
Users can maintain continuous compliance on multiple edge devices with Chef. You can configure settings, perform periodic compliance checks, automatically fix misconfigurations and close the loop between audit and remediation. User-friendly dashboards help provide you and your team a holistic view of your environments, including the application health, compliance status and configurations across your organization's environments and endpoint types.
Elevate your edge game. Choose Chef Edge Management
Chef Edge Management offers a mix of Chef automation tools that enable companies to apply a technology-agnostic and modular approach to defining, packaging and delivering applications at the edge. The solution also helps in reducing deployment failures, accelerating release schedules and configuring security and compliance profiles for your edge devices. This helps maintain the smooth running of the overall operations of your organization.
Large enterprises in industries like manufacturing, retail and healthcare, use Chef Edge Management to improve the quality and frequency of their application deployments on edge devices. With the reduced operational overhead of managing infrastructure complexities at the edge, teams can focus on innovation and improving their customer experiences instead.
To learn more, visit the Chef Edge Management webpage.
