Palette Edge

Palette Edge enables you to deploy Kubernetes workloads in remote locations characterized by limited or intermittent connectivity and limited compute infrastructure. This means you can deploy Kubernetes clusters at scale and ensure application performance, availability, security, and lifecycle management across a diverse range of edge locations. These locations include hospitals, retail stores, Telco environments, restaurants, manufacturing facilities, rural areas, and many more.

Palette Edge supports both VM and container-based workloads, multiple Kubernetes distributions, and Intel and ARM hardware architectures. It is built on top of the open-source project Kairos, which enables the creation and customization of immutable versions of operating systems. Additionally, Palette Edge is designed to scale to tens of thousands of locations while enforcing policies locally within each cluster.

Edge clusters are Kubernetes clusters set up on Edge hosts. These hosts can be bare metal or virtual machines located in isolated locations. Palette deploys and manages workload clusters at the Edge, and the services continue operating even when the connection to the management plane is lost. You can manage Edge clusters locally on-site through Local UI, or centrally through the Palette management plane. Palette Edge is able to meet your needs, regardless of the network topology your deployments face.

Palette Edge also allows you to be confident that all software operating on your Edge hosts is authenticated software verified through cryptographic signatures. Trusted Boot is the security feature that ensures the authenticity of the boot processes. In the event that an Edge device is lost or stolen, the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) will not release the key to decrypt the disk encryption if the boot process is tampered with, ensuring your user data remains encrypted.

Resources

To learn more about Palette Edge, review the Edge section to learn more about Edge and its features. Then, follow the Deploy an Edge Cluster on VMware tutorial to learn how to build Edge artifacts, prepare VMware VMs as Edge hosts using the Edge installer ISO, create a cluster profile referencing a provider image, and deploy a cluster.

Check out the following video for a quick overview of how you can provision and manage thousands of edge Kubernetes clusters with Palette.