PowerFlex runs hundreds of Kubernetes clusters at the edge with Omni
Clean Energy
Edge
North America
PowerFlex, a subsidiary of EDF Renewables, offers solutions for solar, electricity storage, and smart EV charging to commercial and workspace customers, such as Los Angeles Airport (LAX). Their products control power management and delivery via real-time monitoring and their suite of cloud products, helping drivers, building owners, and utilities. They forecast EV load, weather, and power status along with historical load to coordinate power delivery. This enables building owners to charge more vehicles with less infrastructure and less cost, helps utilities avoid peak usage spikes, and helps drivers save money.
Challenge
- Frequent truck rolls
- Custom driver support and remote operations
- High operational overhead and security risks
- Highly customized, hard-to-scale deployments
Environment
- Edge architecture with industrial computers, smart meters, Zigbee controllers, batteries, and microgrid components
- Mix of cellular, WiFi, and compute at customer sites
- Compute-constrained edge environments
Impact
- Remote support tools
- No more OS-related truck rolls
- Centralized cluster management
- Seamless deployments
Why Sidero and Omni
- Custom driver and complex networking support
- Consistent OS across environments
- Immutable, minimal, and secure OS
- Strong remote operability
Bespoke deployments become a bottleneck
PowerFlex deploys an edge architecture that includes smart meters, batteries, microgrid controllers, other electrical system components, and a management system that includes cell networks, WiFi, compute, power, a Zigbee controller, and more.
When PowerFlex initially launched their product with an MVP, deployments were highly customized to the customer site. As the business scaled, PowerFlex knew they needed to build a system that would grow alongside them. They needed to find a solution that simply worked, making their team’s work easier rather than more complex, and they needed to reduce truck rolls, which had become costly and time-consuming. They shifted their focus to building an automated deployment pipeline and implementing an edge OS that offered flexibility, standardization, support, and troubleshooting tools.
Kubernetes was selected for the task, as PowerFlex was already using GKE for cloud services and knew it offered the resiliency, automation, security, and monitoring that they needed to scale. They then chose K3OS as the operating system. While functional, their first iteration presented several roadblocks and hurdles that the team had to address.
PowerFlex found themselves constrained by K3OS. K3OS lacked the custom driver support that PowerFlex needed to work with industrial computers, preventing the team from using certain peripherals and leading to CPUs overheating and constant, expensive truck rolls to replace equipment. They were adapting their application to the technology, rather than the technology supporting them. In addition, PowerFlex was unable to perform reliable remote reboots or change configurations post-deployment, leading to more truck rolls to remote locations.
In addition, PowerFlex generated customer-specific ISOs, which had short life spans due to the short life span of the embedded API token. The team had to prep machines using the same router as was used in the field site, and using the production Vault Secrets to create the image. This process was time-consuming and created a high security risk.
They needed a better architecture for the deployment of Kubernetes at the edge.
Omni and Talos Linux take edge deployments from fragile to flexible
“Talos Linux was really our preferred edge operating system. We found that they provide us flexible deployment options, secure operations, and customizable builds, all of which are essential to us to meet our diverse clients’ needs and use cases.”
Jeff Wright, Director of Product Management – Hardware, PowerFlex
PowerFlex turned to Omni and Talos Linux to build their edge infrastructure. Talos Linux’s broad hardware support allows PowerFlex to integrate custom drivers and handle complex networking setups, which hadn’t been possible with K3OS. Now, they build generic images that can be easily patched with customer specifics, creating a streamlined and secure workflow. Talos Linux runs seamlessly across both compact edge devices.
Previously, PowerFlex had to generate customer-specific ISOs, which had short life spans due to an embedded API token with a short life span. With Omni, that’s no longer necessary.
Omni and Talos Linux provide PowerFlex with the automated tooling to generate and apply customer-specific configuration patches. Talos Linux’s KubeSpan further secures the environment by encrypting traffic between nodes across different locations.
PowerFlex manages hundreds of clusters with no truck rolls
“Omni has been a game changer for us. It provides seamless deployments, centralized cluster management, and remote support tools for our clusters.”
Jeff Wright, Director of Product Management – Hardware, PowerFlex
PowerFlex has now rolled out their Talos Linux with Omni Kubernetes platform to hundreds of sites in the field, enabling them to efficiently scale to thousands of clusters and providing benefits across the entire infrastructure.
Talos Linux runs on smaller, and therefore cheaper, nodes than K3OS, making it cost-feasible for PowerFlex to deploy multi-node clusters at locations where they had previously been running single-node clusters. Talos Linux’s size and speed also ensure that plenty of resources are available for the workloads, which is critical for CPU-constrained industrial computers.
PowerFlex can ensure a highly secure infrastructure due to Talos Linux being both hardened and immutable, which is ideal when nodes are running in environments that are not your typical secure datacenter. It is also kept current with the latest stable Kubernetes and Kernel.
Omni provides additional benefits by acting as the team’s single pane of glass for all clusters, simplifying control access, troubleshooting, and handling operational tasks like upgrades, all from one place. It makes management easy by reducing the experience required to provision production Kubernetes clusters and enabling the automation of cluster operations with cluster templates. Omni increased security by integrating smart authentication via SAML, Google, or GitHub accounts and controls the level of access. Access is easily revoked by deleting the user in Omni or the enterprise SAML directory.
Omni also handles access to the control planes, creating and hosting the load balancer endpoints for every cluster. So if an edge site is lost, simply shipping a new box and adding it to the existing cluster gets is back up and running.
With Omni and Talos Linux, the PowerFlex team has effectively eliminated the need for operating system-related truck rolls.
For more details information, watch the talk from TalosCon 2023.