Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group: Edge Device Onboarding and Management

The conference presentation discussed the use of edge devices and secure booting in the context of Kubernetes and DevOps.

• The group focuses on cool technologies as they evolve at a general level, not specific to one use case like telco.
• Collaboration on firmware and bootloader side is not within the scope of the group, but they welcome presentations and discussions on the topic.
• Tamper-resistant storage is necessary for secure booting of edge devices.
• Web assembly is a cool technology that is gaining interest in the group.
• Telcos have shown interest in the group, but the conversations are not telco-specific.

The speaker mentioned that tamper-resistant storage is necessary for secure booting of edge devices, as these devices are often not physically secure and can be stolen or broken into. He suggested that keys and other sensitive information should be stored in a TPM module or other tamper-resistant storage to prevent unauthorized access.

Integrating I/O and compute devices at edge locations requires automated processes to work at large scale. This session will cover open source tools that support device lifecycles, from secure onboarding and discovery, through monitoring, maintenance, and use in production. We'll survey CNCF, LF Edge, and Eclipse projects designed to extend the cloud to inter-operate with edge devices and I/O; for example, one CNCF project, Akri, discovers edge devices and exposes them as Kubernetes resources. The K8s IoT Edge working group focuses on using Kubernetes as a tool to support applications running on, communicating with, or using information gathered from edge devices. There are opportunities to contribute to the evolution of Kubernetes to better serve edge use cases. We will close with details on how you can get involved with the community effort to help this happen.Click here to view captioning/translation in the MeetingPlay platform!