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Intel Partners with Rafay to Help ISVs Deploy Cloud-First Client Infrastructure

Today, Intel, along with several partners including Rafay, announced its Cloud-First Client (CFC) initiative at the Intel Innovation event. We are incredibly excited to be working with Intel, ISVs and enterprises to help enable this ground-breaking strategy and capability.

Today, with the Kubernetes Operations Platform, Rafay helps ISVs, enterprises, and MSPs manage the lifecycle of clusters and applications across data centers, public clouds, and at remote or edge locations. And now, in support of Intel’s CFC initiative, Rafay is extending support to include clients — in this case, PCs. We call it Dynamic Endpoint Orchestration.

But what is CFC all about and how can Rafay help power this new capability with Dynamic Endpoint Orchestration? Read on to learn more.

What is Intel’s Cloud-First Client?

Intel’s Cloud-First Client initiative defines a new way of thinking of the client (e.g., a PC) as an extension of the cloud. This enhances cloud-native services to provide the best experience by combining the benefits of the cloud and the great user experience of a client. It allows cloud-native Docker/OCI containers to be deployed on the client along with the discovery of client capabilities and orchestration of the container deployment. An orchestration framework facilitates the deployment of these containers and the routing of the traffic from the cloud to the local containers. The following diagram provides a high-level view of what is required in the orchestration framework.

Rafay Intel CFC

In this diagram, note two key items:

  • Containerized microservice(s) are offloaded to end-user client devices on demand
  • Core applications continue to run in the cloud/datacenter environment

Cloud-First Client Use Cases

Using CFC Orchestration service, ISVs can transparently deploy select workloads/microservices onto PC Clients. Some of the benefits are listed below:

End-user benefits: 

  • Deploying microservices in the client provides improved user experience & performance for the applications.
  • Provides a better way to address user privacy concerns by deploying services that can redact the privacy-related data in the client itself. For example, blur the background image of the user camera/video feed in the client.

Benefits to ISVs & Enterprises: 

  • Not needing to write software for multiple platforms. Write as containerized microservices for the cloud and specific microservices can seamlessly be run on the laptop as needed. Development is simplified and offloading big jobs to the PC is easier too.
  • Offload per-user compute from Cloud to user PC and reduce Cloud hosting costs.
  • Latency-sensitive capabilities that are difficult and/or inefficient to deliver from the Cloud (security, video/streaming, user experience monitoring, acceleration, etc.) can be deployed as containers to the client device.

Let’s take an example of a video conference application with two users in the call. The users want to blur the background image for privacy reasons. When User A starts the camera, the video stream is forwarded to a cloud service to blur the background. The below diagram shows the above scenario. As you can see, the privacy information has already crossed the device boundary, and the cloud service provider has access to the data.

CFC can provide a better solution to the above privacy concerns. Using CFC, the cloud service provider can deploy the image processing microservice to the client device and redirect the video stream to the local container to perform the blur operation. Doing so privacy information never reaches the cloud. Offloading blur functionality to the client reduces the consumption of cloud resources such as CPU, memory, and network bandwidth and results in potential cost savings for the ISV.

How Rafay Enables Cloud-First Clients

Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform supports the CFC Orchestration APIs. Using Rafay’s SaaS solution, ISVs can configure the workload/microservices that can be offloaded to CFC-enabled client devices. How easy is this? With Rafay, it takes three easy steps:

Step 1: Signup on the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform and create a workload:

 

Step 2: Define the workload details:

Step 3: Publish the workload:

 

Using CFC APIs, the client devices pull the published workload/microservice definitions on-demand and deploy them locally after evaluating the client capabilities. The CFC client framework also takes care of traffic redirection based on the status of the local container instance.

Ushering In a New Era of Client Computing

As I mentioned, we are incredibly excited to be working with Intel to help enable the CFC initiative. By extending our platform to support CFC, we immediately enable enterprises and ISVs to optionally deploy microservice into client (PC) devices. We are calling this Dynamic Endpoint Orchestration and it’s really the beginning of a new era of client computing.

To learn more about all the innovations Intel released today, attend the Intel Innovation event. Registration is free!

If you are interested in learning more about the CFC initiative or Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform with Dynamic Endpoint Orchestration that enables it, contact us today.

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Tags:
CFC , Cloud-First Client , Cloud-First Client Infrastructure , edge , intel , K8s , K8s Ops , Kubernetes , kubernetes operations

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