Edge Cloud Reference Architecture

To support digital transformation initiatives, IT departments need the right blend of on-premises, public and edge cloud environments to support a variety of existing and emerging use cases while avoiding vendor lock-in and enabling cost optimization. They also need to combine virtual machine workloads with containerized applications from Kubernetes in a shared environment to get the best of both worlds: mature virtualization technologies and orchestration of application containers.

This document presents a powerful distributed Edge Cloud Architecture for OpenNebula composed of Edge Clusters that can run any workload - both virtual machines and containerized applications — on any resource — bare metal or virtualized — anywhere on premises and on a cloud provider. Our Edge Cloud Architecture enables true hybrid and multi-cloud computing by combining public and private cloud operations with workload portability and unified management of IT infrastructure and applications.

We have defined this architecture to be much simpler than traditional cloud computing architectures, which are usually composed of complex, proprietary general-purpose software systems for storage and networking. This architecture has been created from the collective information and experiences of hundreds of users and client engagements for over more than ten years. It builds on storage and networking technologies that already exist in the Linux operating system and on modern storage hardware available from existing cloud and edge providers, leading to a greatly simplified design. Our Edge Cloud Architecture implements enterprise-grade cloud features for performance, availability, and scalability, with a very simple design that avoids vendor lock-in and reduces complexity, resource consumption, and operational costs.

Note

The White Paper on the True Hybrid Cloud Architecture is publicly available for download.