CHARLOTTE, N.C. — NetFoundry and Fortress Data Centers introduced a solution to enable end-to-end, cloud-based orchestration and delivery of edge and IoT applications, regardless of how many underlay networks and clouds they traverse.
The Universal Connected Compute Service simplifies networking, enabling intelligent edge application developers to innovate, and provides an operational structure built for the continuous compute paradigm in which apps are composed of distributed microservices, APIs, and databases, with the workloads processed on compute spanning many edges and clouds.
Edge computing is the extension of the cloud computing paradigm at the edges of the network. Cloud-native applications are becoming more dynamic and distributed as they leverage advances in edge computing and IoT-sourced data, so a simple, extensible orchestration plane and delivery fabric that can provide network-agnostic control, security, and quality is becoming critical to the innovation of intelligent edge applications.
Modern edge and IoT use cases where application response time and reliability is critical for success, requires compute, storage, and networking capabilities to be as close as possible to the devices where data is generated and consumed. Determining the ideal location to place these infrastructure resources involves multiple performance and economic variables across edge device compute, storage, and networking. Securing these distributed, heterogeneous compute environments requires “zero trust” security be inherently designed into the networking fabric rather than trying to bolt on a collection of disparate technologies.
The Universal Connected Compute Service provides instant, secure, performant, and scalable connectivity across edge and IoT app devices, Fortress edge data centers, enterprise cores, and public clouds by integrating NetFoundry's zero trust network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform with Fortress’s edge data center capabilities.
Workloads are managed by a single cloud-orchestrated set of policies and routing, regardless of all the underlying networks.
Here is an overview of how the Universal Connected Compute Service operates, its components, and its capabilities. Today’s advanced applications (IoT, AR/VR, AI/ML) are data-intensive — they push and pull data to and from devices at the edge and to and from clouds and to and from data centers. And all this needs to happen at incredible speeds.
These push-and-pull scenarios typically include applications, compute, and networking combined into systems and subsystems. This “system of systems” is then interconnected to combinations of clouds, private data centers, and mobile and wireless infrastructure. An example system of systems could look like this: Applications running on an edge device (e.g., VR headset, laptop, mobile phone) do some local processing and then automatically route data to low-latency compute at a local Fortress Data Center site. Often simultaneously, edge applications are processing parts of the workload (e.g., video streaming and analysis) on local devices, on servers at Fortress sites, and in various clouds.
