While working for the Australian e-commerce company GraysOnline, then CIO Stewart McGrath and then development manager Daniel Bartholomew found performance, security and scalability were of utmost importance. But in trying to move part of the application closer to the user, they found that content delivery networks (CDNs) posed three challenges:
They were fixed networks, each one insisting their locations were better,
They locked users into a discrete set of proprietary software,
They approached the space from a networking standpoint, leaving developers out of the picture completely.
That was their impetus to create Section, a developer-centric platform for moving parts of the application closer to the edge.
How Kubernetes Could Underpin Edge Computing Platforms The container orchestration engine has potential as an edge solution, but much is left to be solved before it can become one.
By now, you’ve likely heard all about how Kubernetes can simplify the deployment of applications at scale in traditional on-prem and cloud environments. But what about edge architectures that combine central data centers with workloads hosted at edge locations that are closer to end-users? Can Kubernetes underpin an edge computing platform, too?
The answer is maybe. Although Kubernetes has potential as an edge computing solution, Kubernetes developers and users will need to overcome some hurdles before K8s is really ready for the edge.