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Application Management - Edge Orchestration¶

Edge Orchestration¶

Edge Orchestration provides a set of extensions for popular orchestration software (Kubernetes, Kubespray, Tanzu, Rancher, Helm, and so on), which enable clusters to take advantage of Intel® features such as Intel® Resource Director Technology (Intel® RDT) and Intel® Time Coordinated Computing.

Exclusive CAT (ExCAT) microservice for K8s¶

The Exclusive Cache Allocation Technology (ExCAT) microservice enables Intel’s Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) for orchestrated workloads within a Kubernetes cluster. Workloads will be scheduled on cluster nodes that satisfies cache buffer claims specified within the workload specification (Pod Spec). The microservice allocates the cache buffer and ensures that the allocated buffers are exclusively reserved for the workload if needed. CAT may be used to enhance runtime determinism and prioritize important applications such as virtual switches or Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) packet processing apps from resource contention across various priority classes of workloads.

Exclusive CAT (ExCAT) for Ansible¶

ExCAT for Ansible (ExCAT4Ansible) runs a given workload on one of the provided hosts and assigns an area of the cache to the workload for exclusive access. The cache is assigned based on the Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) that is part of the Intel® Resource Director Technology (RDT) feature set. Based on CAT, a Class of Service (CLOS) is created on the chosen node that represents a part of the cache. To prevent the cache from being fragmented, all hosts are checked for previously created Classes of Service that are removed if not in use by a workload anymore. Furthermore, all possible slots on all hosts for the new CLOS to be created are graded before the best one is used for creation of the new CLOS.

Fault tolerance library¶

The Fault Tolerance Library supports workload redundancy for single cycle fail over. The library determines an active instance of the workload that transfers data to a downstream receiver. In case the active instance fails the passive instance takes over and continues to transfer data to the receiver. In contrast to the slow monitoring and recovery mechanisms that is provided by the standard Kubernetes control plane the Fault Tolerance Library provides a much faster fail over.

Deploy Edge Orchestration¶

For more information on installing, configuring, and deploying Edge Orchestration, refer to the Edge Orchestration documentation available in the Edge Orchestration release archives located at Support/Edge-Orchestration within the ECI release archive (release-eci_#.#.zip).

Do the following to prepare the Edge Orchestration release package:

Download the ECI release archive, if not done already.

Copy the Edge Orchestration release archives csl-excat-*.tar.gz and ft_*.tar.gz from the ECI release archive (release-eci_#.#.zip) to the orchestration system. The Edge Orchestration release content is in the ECI release archive within the Support/Edge-Orchestration directory as follows:

└── Support
    └── Edge-Orchestration
        ├── csl-excat-ansible-*.tar.gz
        ├── csl-excat-bin-*.tar.gz
        ├── ft_key_init_bin-*.tar.gz
        ├── ft_lib-*.tar.gz
        ├── ft-lib-sampleapp-demo.tar.gz
        └── release-notes-*.pdf

Open a terminal on the orchestration system and navigate to the directory containing the Edge Orchestration release archives.
From the terminal, extract the Edge Orchestration release archives:
```
$ tar -xzvf ./csl-excat-*.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf ./ft_*.tar.gz
```
In the extracted archive, you will find the directories csl-excat-* and ft_*.

Each Edge Orchestration extension provides its own documentation. For information on installing and using each Edge Orchestration extension, refer to the Edge Orchestration documentation.