As the interest in cloud native computing has grown and with the implementation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which serves as the vendor-neutral home for many open-source projects, it’s important to note CNCF is not just about Kubernetes projects or for building things in the cloud, but using the edge as well. And this is exactly what companies like Red Hat Inc. are pushing.

So what is the state of containerization and the cloud native ecosystem, and where does that fit with edge computing today?

“Edge is like an onion, where you have different layers,” said Nick Barcet (pictured), senior director of technology strategy at Red Hat. “And every time I look at the onion in the perspective of a given customer, the layers are very different. But what we are finding is similar requirements in terms of security, in terms of power consumption, in terms of space allocated for the hardware.”

Barcet spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual event. They discussed edge computing in a cloud native environment and Red Hat’s OpenShift software. (* Disclosure below.)

New ways of deploying on the edge with OpenShift 4.5

In order to satisfy the potential layers that edge computing has, Red Hat found that it needed to build several new ways of deploying OpenShift, according to Barcet. The first way that Red Hat recently released in OpenShift Container Platform 4.5 is making it deployable on three nodes — which means that supervisors, controllers and workers are on the same three physical machines. The second way is to be able to satisfy for single-node deployment.

“Single-node deployment from our perspective needs to come in two flavors. What we call remote-worker node. So you have your controllers in a central site, and you can have up to 2,000 remote-worker nodes spread across as many sites as you want,” Barcet explained. “The caveat with this is that you need to have full-time connectivity. So in order to solve for this connected site, then we need something that is a standalone single-node deployment. And that’s something that a lot of people have prototypes so far, and we are currently working on delivering a version that we hope is going to be satisfying 99% of the requirement.”

So how does a company truly make sure it’s got full visibility and management across all of its environments? Barcet says that GitOps — continuous deployment for cloud native applications — is the future, and Red Hat’s Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes is its solution to making this a reality.

“Basically, you need immutable deployments. You need to be pulling configuration and all information from a central site and adapt it to the local site, without manual intervention. You need full automation, and you need a tool to manage your policies on top of it and … aggregate information on how things are going,” Barcet concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual Experience. Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE