By Joe Pearson, Engineering Strategy and Innovation Leader, IBM Edge Computing
For many companies, setting up heterogeneous fleets of edge devices across remote sites has traditionally been a time-consuming and sometimes difficult process. This week at the Open Networking & Edge Summit conference, IBM announced that Intel’s Secure Device Onboarding (SDO) solution is now fully integrated into Open Horizon and IBM Edge Application Manager and available to developers as a tech preview.
The Intel-developed SDO enables low-touch bootstrapping of required software at device initial power-on. For the Open Horizon project, this enables the agent software to be automatically and autonomously installed and configured. SDO technology is now being incorporated into a new industry onboarding standard being developed by the FIDO Alliance.
Developers can try this out by using the all-in-one version of Open Horizon. Simply run a one-line script on a target edge compute device or VM and simulate powering-up an SDO-enabled device and its onboarding.
Both Open Horizon and SDO recently joined the LF Edge umbrella, which aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system. Thanks to IBM’s participation in the LF Edge open source community, contributors in the community are helping advance the future of open edge computing solutions.
Simplifying edge device onboarding
Our team uses the term “device onboarding” to describe the initial bootstrapping process of installing and configuring required software on an edge computing device. In the case of Open Horizon, that includes connecting it to the Horizon management hub services. We have simplified the software installation process by providing a one-liner script, so that a person can install and run a development version of Open Horizon and SDO on a laptop or in a small virtual machine.
Before SDO was available, the typical installation process required a person to open a secure connection to the device (sometimes on premises), manually install all of the software pre-requisites, then install the Horizon agent, configure it, and register it with the management hub. With SDO support enabled, an administrator simply loads the voucher into the management hub when the device is purchased and then associates the configuration. When a technician powers on the device and connects it to the network, the device automatically finds the SDO services, presents the voucher, and downloads and installs the software automatically.
Integrating SDO into Open Horizon
The Open Horizon project has created a repository specifically for integrating the SDO project components into the Open Horizon management hub services and CLI. The SDO rendezvous service runs along side the management hub and provides a simple interface to bulk load import vouchers.
Visit SDO GitHub
LF Edge and open source leadership
The LF Edge organization continues to strive to ensure that edge computing solutions remain open. In May 2020, IBM contributed Open Horizon to LF Edge. With Intel also contributing SDO to LF Edge, this ensures that another vital component of a complete edge computing framework is also open source.
We’re excited to collaborate with Intel to expand the deployment of applications from open hybrid cloud environments down to the edge, making them accessible, secure, and scalable for the developer ecosystem and community.
Visit our booth to watch the demo
The virtual demo will premiere this week at the conference. Videos will be available in the virtual booth and via the LF Edge YouTube Open Horizon plalist, and representatives from both IBM and Intel will be on-hand to answer questions.
The booth schedule is:
- Monday, September 28. The booth is open 9:00 – 10:15 AM, EST. Booth Crawl at 4:00 – 5:30 PM, EST.
- Tuesday, September 29. The booth is open 9:30 – 11:30 AM, EST.
- Wednesday, September 30. The booth is open 10:00 – 11:30 AM, EST.
