AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Abstracting Out Edge Computing Complexities with AWS and the Edge Signal Platform
By Burak Cakmak, Chief Technology Officer – Edge Signal
By Todd Huckabone, Marketing Support Specialist – Edge Signal
By Peter Tilsen, Sr. Manager, Partner Solutions Architecture – AWS
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| Edge Signal |
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Edge computing continues to pick up steam as more companies invest in Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. According to Deloitte, the enterprise market for edge computing will grow by 22% in 2023, compared to 6% growth on overall enterprise IT.
IoT leverages edge computing and unlocks many use cases on the road to Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing. Technologies like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) rely on edge computing to improve latency and reduce cloud operations, which leads to cost savings in the cloud.
Meanwhile, telecom operators use edge computing to enable 5G applications, and OpenRAN to have vendor-neutral radio networks. Lastly, businesses across several economic sectors employ edge computing to better support their retail locations, remote facilities, and offices.
But as any developer will tell you, collecting and processing data at the edge is not without its challenges. Issues of scalability, connectivity, security, reliability, integration, and management are commonplace. This complexity led the Edge Signal development team to create the Edge Signal infrastructure platform.
Edge Signal is an AWS Partner that provides a simple solution to the complex problem of integrating devices and data into the cloud. The Edge Signal platform helps keep developers focused on their core business and reduces the distractions of infrastructure complexities. It provides a simple solution to integrating edge devices and data into the cloud, as well as for managing most aspects of edge applications.
The Edge Signal platform also enables devices and gateways to be controlled, secured, and updated without costly on-site technicians. With the help of built-in integrations and edge data operations, application developers can easily create solutions such as edge artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, and data aggregation. They can integrate this data with edge applications without needing to possess an extensive understanding of edge computing and its complexities.
How Edge Signal Leverages AWS Services
For this platform project, Edge Signal utilized a pure serverless architecture.
AWS Lambda gives the platform the flexibility needed to run serverless workloads. There are three use cases for Lambda: CRUD operations, microservice-to-microservice event-driven architecture, and ingesting data from device agents.
- CRUD operations: Edge Signal uses Amazon API Gateway to trigger functions via REST requests.
- Microservice-to-microservice event-driven architecture: Edge Signal never directly invokes one function from another. Everything is event-driven, and with the help of Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) the platform can trigger functions in an asynchronous way. This requires a paradigm shift when designing service-to-service communication flows.
- Ingesting data from device agents: Thanks to AWS IoT Core rules, you can run SQL-like queries on streams and trigger Lambda functions depending on your needs.
The Edge Signal platform also utilizes the following AWS IoT services:
- AWS IoT Greengrass for containerized and native application deployment.
- MQTT is the platform’s backbone for creating a bidirectional communication channel between devices and cloud services.
- Amazon Timestream database stores and queries timeseries data in a cost efficient and performant way.
While there are other AWS services used as well, AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is crucial to Edge Signal. The platform is immutable and easily deployed, and AWS CDK helps spin up a new environment easily. Since users can develop infrastructure as code (IaC) with Typescript, it’s also aligned with Edge Signal’s main programing language and testable.
Edge Deployments
The fundamental reason Edge Signal developed this platform is to roll out and manage edge deployments in a flexible and seamless way. All of the features and functionality illustrated in Figure 1 is to fortify edge deployments and bring a best-in-class developer experience.
Users can deploy their own applications along with applications available from the Edge Signal marketplace. Users can send files, pre/post deployment scripts, and data flows together.
Figure 1 – Edge Signal platform – create deployment page.
Edge Signal allows three levels of deployment:
- No code: Just enjoy the ready-to-use integrations and data operations.
- Low code: On top of low code, you can add basic intelligence to flows with inline functions.
- App code: To enable compute-heavy operations like AI use cases, Edge Signal allows users to ship their application code which seamlessly integrate with data flows. Developers don’t need to implement how to retrieve data from IoT and other systems and send to the destination of the data like cloud and enterprise applications.
Single Pane of Glass Management System
Edge Signal provides a single pane of glass management system that enables edge administration with the comfort and ease of cloud computing, from application delivery and infrastructure management to security.
The platform provides tools for efficient operation of edge infrastructure with advanced monitoring, alert, log, and metric management capabilities.
The Edge Signal consolidated management dashboard (see Figure 2) enables hardware-agnostic device management with:
- Zero-touch onboarding of devices: No more complicated multi-step procedures to share with your customers for account, user, or device onboarding. The rapid edge deployment function makes new services available in minutes with minimal training required.
- Built-in secure infrastructure: The platform provides an infrastructure that ensures security for data, both at rest and in transit, and in alignment with AWS Well-Architected Framework principles. Security measures effortlessly integrate with your existing environment, and Edge Signal includes public key infrastructure (PKI) utilization, unique device certificates, mutual TLS authentication, digital vault per deployment, and more.
The Edge Signal solution is fully auditable and delivers operational efficiencies like remote access and commands, optimized operational metrics, alarms, and logs.
Figure 2 – Edge Signal dashboard.
Robust Device and Fleet Management
Edge Signal provides robust device and fleet management, with full visibility and control. Bulk registrations and device groups make it easy to manage device fleets at scale.
The hardware-agnostic solution supports both ARM and x86-based CPU architectures and most common Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Raspbian, CentOS, and Red Hat. You can remote control your devices, run commands and scripts, connect with SSH, view logs, and configure network Wi-Fi settings.
Figure 3 – Edge Signal device details.
Data Flows
The use of data flows in Edge Signal provides visual programming capabilities to allow non-developers to build real applications (see Figure 4). The platform creates a digital twin for each account, which users can then interact with to design their flows.
The benefits of using data flows include no-code integrations, low-code integrations, and compute-intensive integrations.
Figure 4 – Edge Signal data flow.
SDK Support
Edge Signal comes with advanced software support capabilities. The platform provides software developer kit (SDK) support to make your applications configurable and integrated with the Edge Signal Event Bus (see Figure 5).
The platform’s data integration architecture lets you store your own data anywhere you choose, and the event bus connects your applications internally on device and to the cloud.
Figure 5 – Edge Signal SDK architecture.
Application Management
The Edge Signal platform allows you to run edge applications in a single infrastructure. You can run many open-source (databases, cache, proxies, message brokers) and Edge Signal-offered applications for your edge deployments as well as your own.
Application Marketplace enables easy management of edge application suites, allowing upsell to software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and efficient infrastructure management for enterprises.
Figure 6 – Edge Signal applications.
Conclusion
Edge Signal delivers a complete and simplified edge infrastructure for businesses that need to enable edge computing use cases by using AWS services under the hood.
The Edge Signal platform abstracts out the complexities of edge computing infrastructure, allowing customers to enjoy faster time to market. The solution provides operational efficiency and immediate visibility of the network with a powerful, continuously evolving platform, including edge cockpit, operational dashboard, and other application monitoring capabilities.
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Edge Signal – AWS Partner Spotlight
Edge Signal is an AWS Partner that provides a simple solution to the complex problem of integrating devices and data into the cloud.