Red Hat Device Edge Hits General Availability, Offers an Enterprise Platform for the IoT and More

Red Hat has announced that its Device Edge platform, designed for resource-constrained platforms and the Internet of Things (IoT), is now in general availability — with optional support for Kubernetes container orchestration and integration when required.

"Red Hat Device Edge is community tested and ecosystem verified, built to extend Red Hat's hybrid cloud solutions all the way out to our customer and partner's furthest and most hard to reach edge use cases," claims Red Hat's Francis Chow of the launch. "With the inclusion of Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Device Edge offers organizations tools for consistent and dependable automation from sea to space and everywhere in between."

Red Hat Device Edge combines a resource-light operating system derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the company's Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform — supporting management scaling to, the company claims, "thousands of sites, network devices, and clusters." The Device Edge platform also includes MicroShift, an open source lightweight Kubernetes project originally derived from Red Hat OpenShift, which offers container orchestration and full Kubernetes integration.

Red Hat claims that its platform offers a minimal footprint for resource-constrained devices at the edge, a more consistent operational experience with familiarity for those already using OpenShift to manage larger systems, and simplified deployment at scale. The company has confirmed it is working with partners and customers including Intel and Lockheed Martin to test and validate the platform.

With Red Hat Device Edge, the company claims to be offering an enterprise-ready platform for devices "including Internet of Things (IoT) gateways, industrial controllers, smart displays, point of sales terminals, vending machines, robots, and more." Devices will, however, need to meet minimum requirements: at least one processor core and 1.5GB of RAM for the base operating system alone, or two cores and 2GB of RAM with MicroShift.

More information on the platform is available on the Red Hat website; pricing has not been made public, but the company has confirmed a Red Hat Device Edge Essentials tier with Linux and MicroShift plus a higher Red Hat Device Edge tier which adds the company's Ansible Automation Platform.