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Rafay Extends Amazon EKS Operations Support for 5G Edge Applications using AWS Wavelength

As deployment of 5G networks continues to expand and become more widespread globally, technologies such as AWS Wavelength are an integral part of supporting applications on the edge of these networks. First launched in August of 2020, AWS Wavelength allows solution providers to use AWS compute and storage services, including Amazon EKS clusters, within supported carrier 5G networks to build and run high performance and low latency applications. AWS Wavelength Zones are being rolled out in major cities throughout the world and are used as a logical  extension of an AWS Region to bring applications and services closer to users. By bringing these applications to the mobile edge on Kubernetes, including for IOT use cases, end-users are provided with an improved experience and allows for the creation of a new class of use cases that require ultra-low-latency.

Amazon EKS is a managed service built on Kubernetes that automates many of the manual processes involved in deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications. AWS customers can now use Amazon EKS to orchestrate containers within AWS Wavelength Zones. While Amazon EKS simplifies the orchestration of containerized applications running in production, it does add operational overhead when managing Kubernetes across multiple clusters, regions, and Kubernetes on edge environments like AWS Wavelength.  

Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP) provides a holistic approach to streamlining modern infrastructure operations by dramatically simplifying the lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters (including Amazon EKS) and modern applications located in data centers, public clouds, and Kubernetes on edge, including AWS Wavelength Zones. With Rafay, enterprises can use any Kubernetes distribution and immediately gain centralized automation, security, visibility, and governance capabilities with features for multi-cluster management, GitOps-powered deployments, zero-trust access, policy management, back-up and restore, and centralized visibility and monitoring.  

The Rafay KOP has supported AWS Wavelength from the beginning, enabling AWS customers to leverage the Rafay platform to extend streamlined operations of Amazon EKS clusters to AWS Wavelength Zones. Rafay is excited to announce we have released additional features for AWS Wavelength that further automates the AWS Wavelength node group provisioning and application deployment process.

Setup networking configurations between the carrier network and AWS Wavelength node groups using Rafay

In order to set up key networking elements inside of an AWS Wavelength node group without Rafay KOP is a multi-step, manual process that includes: 

  1. Provisioning VPCs, extending to the carrier through a carrier gateway and setting up additional routing
  2. Ensuring networking for AWS Wavelength nodes groups is connected between the carrier subnet resources and Amazon EKS control plane
  3. Provisioning a carrier IP to each AWS Wavelength node for inbound and outbound access through the carrier network

Rafay removes these manual steps, which can be error prone for people not familiar with carrier networks, through an automated workflow within our Amazon EKS node group provisioning process.  Through Rafay’s Amazon EKS node group setup process, AWS Wavelength customers simply check the Wavelength Node Group box, manually provide an existing subnet or use the Rafay auto create by providing a subnet range, and entering the AWS Wavelength Zone. These steps can be done through the Rafay UI, which is seen below, a CLI, or API workflows for provisioning an Amazon EKS node group. For a step by step process on configuring an AWS Wavelength node group see Rafay’s online documentation on AWS Wavelength features

Rafay automates application deployments to AWS Wavelength node groups

Once you have your Amazon EKS node groups running in one or more AWS Wavelength Zones, another important step is deploying applications to the Amazon EKS nodes. Without Rafay, there are multiple advanced techniques that solution providers need to implement to deploy their applications to AWS Wavelength node groups. This includes using advanced scheduling logic to control placement of an application POD to a specific AWS Wavelength Zone, carefully configure taints, tolerations, and affinity for the nodes to orchestrate the POD scheduling logic, and create duplicate deployments for the application with different names and using the previous taints, tolerants, and affinity to make sure each instance gets scheduled to the intended AWS Wavelength node groups. These steps can be onerous and complicated as you increase the number of applications and/or AWS Wavelength Zones.  

Rafay automates this process with two critical features:

  1. Workload templates for the application definition
  2. Gitops pipelines to create instances of the application automatically, and deploy the application to appropriate AWS Wavelength Zones

As highlighted in the next figure, the required taints,toleration & affinity settings are taken care of by the Rafay platform. Solution providers only need to provide the application definition in a helm or yaml file and select the correct AWS Wavelength Zone label under Node Grouping Keys inside the Rafay Workload Template to deploy the application. Click here to learn more on how to deploy applications to AWS Wavelength node groups using Workload Templates.

Conclusion

With Rafay, AWS customers can accelerate their application modernization journey on the edge. Rafay’s SaaS-first Kubernetes operations platform enables customers to spin up Amazon EKS clusters in AWS Regions or in AWS Wavelength Zones, automating the configuration of key networking components between the carrier network and the AWS Wavelength Zone. Additionally, Rafay automates the application deployment process and enables you to leverage the same application that is running within nodes across Amazon EKS Regions and AWS Wavelength Zones without modifying the application to run in a particular environment.  For enterprises building containerized applications for low-latency use cases, Amazon EKS, AWS Wavelength, and Rafay make managing and scaling their operations easy.  Learn more by watching our video tutorial.

Ready to find out why so many solution providers have partnered with Rafay to streamline AWS Wavelength operations?  Sign up for a free trial today.

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Tags:
aws 5g , aws wavelength zones , kubernetes 5g , kubernetes edge , kubernetes on edge

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