Today, we're happy to announce that Buoyant has partnered with SUSE/Rancher to build the world's fastest, lightest, and most secure edge computing platform.

Edge computing is an increasingly important part of the Cloud Native landscape. In an edge compute deployment, data is processed at the "edge" of the network close to where it is generated, without any requirement that it be shipped to a centralized server. The rapid rise of edge computing is driven in no small part by the explosive growth in connected devices, from security cameras to oil rigs to autonomous vehicles.

While edge computing is an increasingly critical use case, building a reliable, secure, and manageable edge architecture is far from trivial. Edge computing brings a unique set of demands compared to "traditional" server compute, including:

• Edge devices can be very resource constrained and make heavy use of power-efficient CPU architectures such as ARM.
• Network connectivity for edge devices can be sporadic and tenuous.
• The scale of edge compute endpoints for a single application can be tremendous, especially in "Internet of Things" scenarios.
• Edge compute devices may run in untrusted environments and may need to communicate sensitive information over the open Internet

SUSE and Linkerd are both experts in addressing exactly these challenges. Linkerd, and its enterprise-focused cousin, Linkerd Enterprise, provides secure, reliable communication between endpoints that is transparent to the application and resilient to failures of network and system, no matter how large. Linkerd's unique "microproxy" architecture, written in Rust—the language of the future—has fully supports ARM and ARM64 architectures for years. And SUSE's powerful suite of edge-capable Kubernetes orchestration and management tools, including K3s, RKE2, and Rancher Prime, solve the challenges of how to deploy and maintain edge workloads at scale.

Mesh expansion for all

One critical part of addressing the challenge of making edge computing safe, secure, and reliable, is adding support for extending Linkerd's "data plane" to non-Kubernetes deployments. This expansion would allow edge compute devices that are not acting as Kubernetes nodes to still participate in the mesh, with all the security and reliability benefits thereof.

To this end, Buoyant and SUSE are collaborating on the upcoming Linkerd 2.15 release to introduces exactly this capability in the form of mesh expansion, a powerful new feature of Linkerd that allows workloads outside of Kubernetes to deploy the Linkerd microproxy, and join the mesh in a way that provides all the benefits of security, reliability, and application transparency enjoyed by Kubernetes workloads today.

Learn more

At Kubecon NA next month in Chicago, the Buoyant and SUSE teams will be demoing these edge capabilities including some of the upcoming mesh expansion features in Linkerd 2.15. Join us at the Buoyant and SUSE Kubecon booths to learn more:

• Buoyant booth location
• SUSE booth location

This is just the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership, and we look forward to providing our adopters and customers with the fastest, lightest, and most secure edge computing platform in the world.