Challenges of the network far edge

Challenges of the network far edge

Edge computing presents complex challenges when managing many sites in geographically displaced locations. Use zero touch provisioning (ZTP) and GitOps to provision and manage sites at the far edge of the network.

Overcoming the challenges of the network far edge

Today, service providers want to deploy their infrastructure at the edge of the network. This presents significant challenges:

How do you handle deployments of many edge sites in parallel?
What happens when you need to deploy sites in disconnected environments?
How do you manage the lifecycle of large fleets of clusters?

Zero touch provisioning (ZTP) and GitOps meets these challenges by allowing you to provision remote edge sites at scale with declarative site definitions and configurations for bare-metal equipment. Template or overlay configurations install OKD features that are required for CNF workloads. The full lifecycle of installation and upgrades is handled through the ZTP pipeline.

ZTP uses GitOps for infrastructure deployments. With GitOps, you use declarative YAML files and other defined patterns stored in Git repositories. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (RHACM) uses your Git repositories to drive the deployment of your infrastructure.

GitOps provides traceability, role-based access control (RBAC), and a single source of truth for the desired state of each site. Scalability issues are addressed by Git methodologies and event driven operations through webhooks.

You start the ZTP workflow by creating declarative site definition and configuration custom resources (CRs) that the ZTP pipeline delivers to the edge nodes.

The following diagram shows how ZTP works within the far edge framework.

Using ZTP to provision clusters at the network far edge

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (RHACM) manages clusters in a hub-and-spoke architecture, where a single hub cluster manages many spoke clusters. Hub clusters running RHACM provision and deploy the managed clusters by using zero touch provisioning (ZTP) and the assisted service that is deployed when you install RHACM.

The assisted service handles provisioning of OKD on single node clusters, three-node clusters, or standard clusters running on bare metal.

A high-level overview of using ZTP to provision and maintain bare-metal hosts with OKD is as follows:

A hub cluster running RHACM manages an internal registry that mirrors the OKD release images. RHACM uses the internal registry to provision the managed clusters.
You manage the bare-metal hosts in a YAML format inventory file, versioned in a Git repository.
You make the hosts ready for provisioning as managed clusters, and use RHACM and the assisted service to install the bare-metal hosts on site.

Installing and deploying the clusters is a two-stage process, involving an initial installation phase, and a subsequent configuration phase. The following diagram illustrates this workflow:

Installing managed clusters with SiteConfig resources and RHACM

GitOps ZTP uses SiteConfig custom resources (CRs) in a Git repository to manage the processes that install OKD clusters. The SiteConfig CR contains cluster-specific parameters required for installation. It has options for applying select configuration CRs during installation including user defined extra manifests.

The ZTP GitOps plugin processes SiteConfig CRs to generate a collection of CRs on the hub cluster. This triggers the assisted service in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (RHACM) to install OKD on the bare-metal host. You can find installation status and error messages in these CRs on the hub cluster.

You can provision single clusters manually or in batches with ZTP:

Provisioning a single cluster

Create a single SiteConfig CR and related installation and configuration CRs for the cluster, and apply them in the hub cluster to begin cluster provisioning. This is a good way to test your CRs before deploying on a larger scale.

Provisioning many clusters

Install managed clusters in batches of up to 400 by defining SiteConfig and related CRs in a Git repository. ArgoCD uses the SiteConfig CRs to deploy the sites. The RHACM policy generator creates the manifests and applies them to the hub cluster. This starts the cluster provisioning process.

Configuring managed clusters with policies and PolicyGenTemplate resources

Zero touch provisioning (ZTP) uses Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (RHACM) to configure clusters by using a policy-based governance approach to applying the configuration.

The policy generator or PolicyGen is a plugin for the GitOps operator that enables creation of RHACM policies from a concise template. The tool can combine multiple CRs into a single policy, and you can generate multiple policies that apply to various subsets of clusters in your fleet.

For scalability and to reduce the complexity of managing configurations across the fleet of clusters, use configuration CRs with as much commonality as possible.

Where possible, apply configuration CRs using a fleet-wide common policy.
The next preference is to create logical groupings of clusters to manage as much of the remaining configurations as possible under a group policy.
When a configuration is unique to an individual site, use RHACM templating on the hub cluster to inject the site-specific data into a common or group policy. Alternatively, apply an individual site policy for the site.

The following diagram shows how the policy generator interacts with GitOps and RHACM in the configuration phase of cluster deployment.

For large fleets of clusters, it is typical for there to be a high-level of consistency in the configuration of those clusters.

The following recommended structuring of policies combines configuration CRs to meet several goals:

Describe common configurations once and apply to the fleet.
Minimize the number of maintained and managed policies.
Support flexibility in common configurations for cluster variants.

Table 1. Recommended PolicyGenTemplate policy categories
Policy category	Description
Common	A policy that exists in the common category is applied to all clusters in the fleet. Use common `PolicyGenTemplate` CRs to apply common installation settings across all cluster types.
Groups	A policy that exists in the groups category is applied to a group of clusters in the fleet. Use group `PolicyGenTemplate` CRs to manage specific aspects of single-node, three-node, and standard cluster installations. Cluster groups can also follow geographic region, hardware variant, etc.
Sites	A policy that exists in the sites category is applied to a specific cluster site. Any cluster can have its own specific policies maintained.

Additional resources

For more information about extracting the reference SiteConfig and PolicyGenTemplate CRs from the ztp-site-generate container image, see Preparing the ZTP Git repository.