2024: A Remarkable Year for Avassa in Retail and Industrial Edge

2024 has been an outstanding year for Avassa, with significant traction in the Retail and Industrial Edge verticals. Customers continue to choose Avassa for several compelling reasons:

• Lightweight yet feature-rich platform for the edge: By avoiding the complexity of running Kubernetes and its associated ecosystem at every edge site, Avassa eliminates a significant portion of operational challenges.
• Proven scalability: Avassa seamlessly manages tens of thousands of edge sites, setting a benchmark for scale and reliability.
• Ease of use and automation: Purpose-built for edge management, Avassa automates operational tasks while handling edge-specific characteristics like unstable connections and offline scenarios. Unlike repurposed cloud tools, Avassa doesn’t require manual workarounds for these challenges. Getting started with Avassa is a breeze with automated host onboarding and the correct level of abstractions. This guarantees quick value for your organisation.
• Site autonomy: All control functionality is executed locally at the edge, enabling sites to operate autonomously for weeks without requiring connectivity to the Control Tower. Resources such as secrets, images, and pub/sub bus data are managed locally.
• Robust edge security: The Avassa Edge Enforcer and built-in secrets manager ensure top-notch security for application data and networks.

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The Move Towards Linux and Containerized Applications

We’ve witnessed a significant industry shift toward Linux and container-based applications. With an array of Linux distributions offering excellent edge-specific features like small footprints and high performance, Avassa empowers customers to select their preferred OS. Unlike solutions that impose proprietary OS requirements, Avassa respects the flexibility to choose based on support, security, and other factors.

In the IoT domain, however, the complete edge stack must be orchestrated, including both the OS and the application layers. To address this, Avassa introduced OS upgrade functionality in 2024 (Learn more here). Customers can now leverage their preferred Linux distributions with Avassa’s ready-made plugins for OS-specific upgrade features. This enhancement offers multiple benefits:

• Unified orchestration of OS and applications.
• Seamless OS updates with maximum application availability, including optional application migrations between hosts during upgrades.
• Advanced OS features like A/B partitions for robust updates.
• Freedom to choose trusted, familiar OS distributions.

Supporting Legacy Applications with VM Orchestration

While containers have revolutionized application packaging and distribution at the edge, many customers still rely on legacy applications, often Windows-based, that require orchestration at the edge. To meet this need, Avassa introduced VM lifecycle management capabilities (Learn more here). Without requiring an external hypervisor, the Avassa Edge Enforcer utilizes the widely available KVM hypervisor to manage VMs directly on edge hosts. This ensures seamless orchestration of both modern and legacy workloads at the edge.

Watch this demo on VM management from Avassa in this presentation at Edge Field Day 3: https://youtu.be/zjKipGXrk7k?si=0HSqsaIU642mD4HE

Edge AI: Moving from Prototype to Reality

Edge AI has evolved from proof-of-concept to production, and customers are turning to Avassa for managing real-world Edge AI deployments. Effective management of AI models at the edge involves secure, fast updates and lifecycle management of model versions, as well as oversight of API endpoints. Furthermore, Avassa simplifies the integration of Nvidia and Intel GPUs with edge applications, eliminating manual setup steps.

Watch a demo with our parther Databricks or read a case description.

In Summary

Avassa’s innovations in lightweight edge management, Linux OS support, legacy VM orchestration, and AI deployment empower customers to navigate the complexities of edge computing with ease and confidence. Whether modern containers, legacy VMs, or emerging AI workloads, Avassa is the trusted partner for orchestrating an edge of the future.