Microsoft has launched a Kubernetes distribution designed for IoT and edge environments. AKS Lite provides container management and automation for deployments in factories and industrial locations, as well as retail, hospital and essential infrastructure environments.

Kubernetes is designed to simplify and automate container management. Kubernetes is typically found on cloud installations, but AKS Lite has been designed for the specific workload and business environments typical in edge computing settings.

AKS lite is designed as a lightweight, Kubernetes platform to enable rapid application innovation and modernisation at scale at the edge.

Kubernetes is currently used extensively in the cloud as well as on server-class hyperconverged infrastructure on the edge. Many companies also wish to extend Kubernetes to their IoT and edge based infrastructure. This would provide them with a consistent cloud-native platform that extends across cloud, customer-owned infrastructure, and edge and IoT environments. lightweight devices.

If prediction models can integrate inputs from operational technology and video systems, operational and business analytics can be adjusted in real-time to obtain more accurate predictions.

The architectural requirements of Kubernetes on the edge are different from its established architecture in the cloud. Smaller, resource constrained edge devices require Kubernetes to be able to scale and manage workloads on hundreds of distributed nodes. Rather than having thousands of containers running on a few large Kubernetes clusters, the operational edge requires thousands of dispersed clusters, each running a few containers. This means that IoT and edge container deployments require simplified management and visibility across the operational environment.

AKS lite is designed to bring the AKS platform to light-weight edge devices. AKS is a managed, CNCF-conformant, Kubernetes platform that can run both Linux and Windows container applications. AKS lite builds on this platform to offer a light-weight Kubernetes distribution – both K8S and K3S, that can be deployed at the edge, on any Windows PC class device with Windows 10 and 11 IoT Enterprise, Enterprise and Pro.

AKS lite will be available for public preview in November 2022. Microsoft is currently accepting limited private preview customers, and is welcoming approaches from potential early customers.