- Wow, man.
The Mars Rover has to be one of the edgiest of edge devices.
What happens when you need to push updates?
I mean, there's no 5G in space.
NASA must be used to dealing with
an amount of uncertainty that for a guy like me
who lives more in a data center or the cloud,
it would be really nerve wracking
to operate and monitor compute nodes millions of miles away.
What does it even mean to operate at the edge?
(upbeat music)
One of the things that eases tensions
when operating compute nodes in far away and scary places
is the ability to monitor them with telemetry data.
Telemetry is the collection of measurements
or other data at remote points.
Telemetry is based on instrumentation
and gives you observability into complex systems.
It's used to monitor device utilization,
the performance of applications
and provides system feedback.
Telemetry produces a stream of events to monitor the system
and that insight provides the impetus
to automate a response.
Oh, Hey Stefanie, how's it going?
- Hey Chris.
Hey, I was just checking in.
I thought that last meeting went okay,
but I just wanted to make sure
you were feeling good about it,
or if you had any follow-ups or anything from that call?
- Yeah, you know, I did think it went pretty well.
I gotta admit I was just actually looking at some
Mars rovers pictures and it's amazing.
I can't help but think about
what a challenge it would be to manage devices you know,
edge devices like, like rovers.
- It's like having that remoteness
has this like whole new layer of fear and uncertainty.
How do I know?
Is it going okay?
I don't have an IT team standing next to it
to take care of it.
- It's true I mean, it's a leap of faith and I think,
I don't know, one of the things that I think helps is
creating some visibility or observability
- You know, you take that distance and that uncertainty
and then you apply it over a broad number.
You can't monitor tens of thousands of unique things.
So now you have to figure out what is that baseline?
So you can say okay,
if I don't hear anything, it's probably running okay,
cause I know what a watermark is for that visibility
but then, I know when something blips up, it's like,
okay, that's where I can focus my attention on.
That at least gives you a sense of comfort
because there's no way you can monitor everything uniquely
all the time.
- Yeah, I think that's a great point.
Having that telemetry data or that stream of information
associated with the devices,
looking for anomalous behavior,
is a way that we can then trigger automation
to bring back the system to a standard operating model
that consistent baseline that we've kind of identified
and we understand as this, you know,
these edge devices can look more and more appliance like.
- Yeah, I mean, you have to know that what you start with
is set to run at that normal, you know, that new normal.
So, I think we're seeing that
in a lot of areas in it though, right?
Even in an operating system,
being able to deploy an immutable image so knowing,
I know it was put out there,
I know it's going to stay that way.
That becomes part of setting up that standard
of having something that's consistent.
It's the same thing with containerization
and the beauty of containerization of applications, right?
You build the container once, you deploy it once
or you deploy it 10,000 times, it's deployed the same way.
- That's a great point, I love that connection between
what we've learned in cloud native development
and the immutable images of containers,
you don't log in, you don't SSH into your container
and RPM update packages, you rebuild the image
and you redeploy,
and that same concept really critical
when we talk about the edge I mean, I don't know,
I think, bringing the operations teams together
probably requires some consistency in
not just how we build and deliver the applications
but the kind of the common framework
for that whole picture of
streaming content or streaming observability data
and the remediation with automation
and that sounds a lot like a common language
or a common mechanism for broad groups to coordinate it.
- I think it works on on all the levels
that we're looking at here in IT,
especially around edge you know, you get that common,
that baseline that we talked about of
how you actually deploy your edge.
Then you got that common kind of way to communicate
or assess the data they get sent back
and that's across your it team
but then even in a market level
or even at a technology level, it's that consistency,
so that the network knows what to expect from the hardware
that the operating system,
knows what to expect from the applications,
that you know, your networking team
knows what to expect from the ops team.
It's like having some way to communicate
and a set of like, kind of just expectations
that baseline of communication is critically important,
otherwise you're recreating all the time.
Oh shoot, Chris, I got to run, I totally missed the time,
I know this could happen every time I call you but anyway,
loved chatting, but I gotta bolt.
- All right, thanks Stefanie - I'll talk to you later
- see ya. - Cheers
With scale and consistency fundamental to edge computing,
How do we think about ops management differently?
It's less about synchronous management
and more about asynchronous.
We're going to get too much information
and we have to be ready to respond
to the anomalous behaviors.
And when devices and sensors have to be spread further
over huge even inaccessible areas
like assembly lines, subterranean wells,
along railroad tracks for thousands of miles
or in the deep reaches of space,
consistency and predictability become mission critical.
(upbeat music)