Platform9 Edge Stack Overview
Platform9 Edge Stack is designed to be centrally managed and provides the ability to create and manage multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters across various geographical locations. Once installed, you will notice two distinct sets of components:
- The Management Plane (sometime referred to as Deployment Unit or DU)
- The Cluster Components(Kubernetes and its associated components - mainly referred to as 'Host side components')
The Management Plane (DU)
A Deployment Unit (DU) is a unit of deployment that typically represents a region for a given customer. You may also refer to this as the Platform9 Management Plane. The current version of the management plane DU runs as a virtual machine on the deployment host. Future version will be moving to a containerized version of the same stack. Management plane is the component that contains various functions like the following:
- Authentication services
- Cluster management services
- Host management services
- Security and tunneling services
- Data services, including message queues and databases
- Monitoring services like Grafana or Prometheus
A detailed architecture and is provided in the architecture section of the documentation.
Cluster Components
Each management service controls one or more Kubernetes clusters, each cluster contains not only the Kubernetes services but also the services/components needed to help manage the Kubernetes cluster itself and other add-ons. These include
- Kubernetes components like the api-server, scheduler, etcd, kubelet etc.
- CNIs: Calico, Flannel, SRIOV etc.
- Monitoring: Prometheus
- Supporting services to manage and upgrade the Kubernetes cluster.
See the architecture section for more details.