Bringing a cloud-native experience to the edge

It is already clear that placing processing resources at the edge, rather than in centralised data centres, will be of huge value in the future. Having such resources closer to the actual applications will mean that low latency responsiveness can be derived, and network congestion avoided. However, hardware diversity presents a major obstacle when it comes to getting everything to interact effectively. A way must therefore be found to successfully manage edge compute assets at scale across various different platforms, so that potential fragmentation issues will not arise. This must be done while still maintaining the highest degrees of security.

Through Project Cassini, Arm and technology partners like EBV have been able to construct a multifaceted ecosystem that will facilitate software development for edge-related infrastructure. The initiative relies on the building of a comprehensive standards framework, plus use of advanced architecture-agnostic security application programming interfaces and cloud-native stacks that are applicable across different Arm-based hardware platforms. Deployment times are significantly accelerated and the associated operational expenditure is kept to a minimum. Customers are also able to benefit from access to a wide array of open source reference solutions that will provide them with starting points for their implementations.

“Arm’s Project Cassini will enable the simplification of edge application software developments, establishing robust standards and delivering cloud-native software stacks that will result in unprecedented interoperability across a broad spectrum of different hardware systems,” said Antonio Fernandez, EBV Elektronik’s vice president of Technical Development. “Edge computing will be an essential element of large scale IoT roll-out, but there are substantial security and technology fragmentation challenges to overcome.”

EBV has collaborated with Avnet sister companies Avnet Embedded and Witekio to contribute to this initiative and will assist customers seeking to integrate Project Cassini technology into their products through the founding of a centre of excellence that will make the whole compliance process much more straightforward.