Secured IoT Platform
A leading Fortune-500 energy company, facing challenges in managing 1.5 million IoT endpoints across Azure IoT and AWS IoT platforms, collaborated with Edgenesis to streamline their IoT infrastructure. With an ambitious goal and a complex array of functionalities including device onboarding, connectivity, edge AI, and security, the enterprise sought to overcome the hurdles of extended development cycles, interoperability issues, and escalating costs.
Edgenesis introduced a Kubernetes-native IoT solution, Shifu, tailored to address these challenges head-on, facilitating seamless device lifecycle management, enhanced security, and scalable edge AI capabilities.
Edgenesis helped to:
- Accelerate Development: Reduced device integration timeframes from years to mere months, cutting labor and overhead costs by an estimated by an estimated 70%
- Centralize Monitoring and Control: Shifu-powered device management provided single-pane-of-glass visibility and control across the entire IoT landscape
- Enhance Security: Ensured robust security measures and seamless integration of various IoT devices and protocols, including legacy systems, into a unified management platform
- Improve Scalability: The Kubernetes-based architecture ensures the platform can seamlessly scale to accommodate millions of devices
- Facilitate Operational Agility: The cloud-agnostic approach allows the company to select the most suitable cloud providers based on cost, functionality, and regional needs
Challenges
- Multi-Cloud Sprawl: Utilizing Azure IoT and AWS IoT simultaneously created management complexity and delayed the development cycle
- Legacy Infrastructure: Integrating existing Modbus and OPC UA devices into the new system posed a challenge
- Siloed Development: Independent teams working on disparate solutions resulted in a fragmented IoT landscape
- Scalability Concerns: Scaling to millions of devices while supporting critical edge AI functionalities remained a concern
- Security Risks: The need to fortify security against vulnerabilities prevalent in low-end IoT devices
- Extended Development Cycle: Managing dual cloud platforms (Azure IoT and AWS IoT) and integrating 6,000 devices took 2 years, significantly behind schedule
Edgenesis Solution
Production-Grade IoT Development with Shifu Cloud
Offering a plug-and-play solution for device onboarding and management, enabling quick and easy setup of IoT projects and device templates for streamlined device integration.
Robust Security
SPIRE was implemented for secure device identity and access control. Open Policy Agent (OPA) enabled fine-grained policy-based access management. Cilium CNI provided end-to-end traffic security with mTLS.
Centralized Device Management
Shifu, a Kubernetes-native IoT platform, virtualizes IoT devices as Kubernetes Pods for streamlined lifecycle management.
Edge AI Optimization
The solution incorporated lightweight Kubernetes runtime at the edge, providing the foundation for efficient edge deployments.
Network Agility
Multus CNI facilitated the attachment of multiple network interfaces to Pods, enhancing network scalability.
Cloud-Agnostic Architecture
The Kubernetes-based infrastructure enabled a platform-agnostic approach, ensuring flexibility to work across cloud providers (Azure, AWS, or others).
Legacy Device Integration
Seamless integration of existing devices utilizing Modbus and OPC UA protocols was achieved using specialized device adapters.
