Advantages

High-Performance Intelligent Edge Hardware

IEF provides a software and hardware integrated solution, which offers users with low-cost, out-of-the-box, and centralized on-cloud O&M services. It uses Huawei general-purpose servers and AI hardware and is deeply integrated with Huawei Ascend chips to provide high-performance, low-cost edge AI inference computing power. IEF also supports TaiShan servers that use Huawei Kunpeng processors.

Figure 1 Edge hardware

Security and Reliability

• IAM authentication

  Agencies can be created in Identity and Access Management (IAM) to allow edge nodes to access resources such as Application Operations Management (AOM), Data Ingestion Service (DIS), and SoftWare Repository for Container (SWR).

• Edge node security

  Edge Agent creates dedicated service users whose accessible directories and permissions are limited. Users can upload logs and monitoring information to the cloud based on their requirements.

• Edge-cloud synergy communication security

  Edge Agent initiates a request to IEF for establishing a bidirectional encrypted channel. Messages exchanged between devices and IEF are authenticated and encrypted by certificates.

• Cloud security

  The frontend anti-DDoS protects the cloud against malicious attacks.

  A unique access certificate is issued for each edge node. Bidirectional communication is authenticated and encrypted by certificates.

• Device security

  End devices use certificates for identity authentication.

Figure 2 IEF security solution

Open Compatibility

IEF is based on the open-source software KubeEdge. Based on Kubernetes, KubeEdge provides fundamental infrastructure support for network, application deployment, and metadata synchronization between the cloud and edge.

By using KubeEdge, developers can customize and tailor the edge node runtime (Edge Agent, an edge node manager) to reduce the difficulty in using edge nodes.

Cost-effective

• The combination of cloud and edge computing implements data filtering and analysis on edge nodes, which greatly improves efficiency and reduces cloud computing costs.
• During cloud transmission, simple data processing is performed by edge nodes, so that the response time of end devices is shortened, data traffic from end devices to the cloud is decreased, and bandwidth costs are reduced.