Application Placement and Life Cycle Management

Now that we’ve covered the foundational concepts and attributes of Edge computing, we will take a deeper look at the practice of application placement and life cycle management – arguably one of the most important issues in scaling a production Edge solution. We’ll introduce the Linux Foundation LF Edge Open Horizon project and its commercial distribution provided with IBM Edge Application Manager (IEAM). These will be leveraged heavily in the remainder of this book to assist with reducing the complexities of application placement and life cycle management that can otherwise derail a successful deployment.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Deploying containers to the Edge
• Introduction to Open Horizon and IEAM
• The architecture of the management system
• The components of the Management Hub
• More about the Edge Agent
• An examination of service life cycles...