2 Welcome to your edge testbed

 

This chapter covers

  • Launching an edge testbed
  • Using the testbed management dashboard
  • Launching a simple edge application
  • Building your own edge application

In chapter 1 you learned many of the motivations and benefits of adopting edge-computing principles to address a number of challenges. Now that you have an idea of what edge computing is all about, you might wonder what it looks like in action. In this chapter you’ll be introduced to the pre-configured edge-computing environment that will be used to demonstrate the concepts covered in this book.

Configuring your own environment

Although we provide an edge-computing environment to make your learning easier, appendix A is provided for the adventurous, which walks you through the manual process of building your own edge development environment, including the modification of edge framework itself.

2.1   Getting to know your edge environment

Although early in its maturity as an independent sub-domain of distributed computing, a number of edge-computing platform choices exist. Platforms that make use of edge concepts might be positioned as IoT, microservices, fog, hybrid cloud, or other types of computing systems. This book will aid your ability to identify the “edgeness” of specific platforms and tools.

2.2   Launching an edge testbed

2.2.1   Docker for Windows: Docker Toolbox and Docker Desktop

2.2.2   Starting the edge container

2.2.3   Launching the agent

2.2.4   Shutting down the agent

2.3   Launching an edge application

2.3.1   Mounting a local directory in your Docker container

2.3.2   Downloading the example plugin

2.3.3   Using the testbed dashboard

2.3.4   Logging into the dashboard

2.3.5   Uploading the example plugin to the agent

2.3.6   Adding and configuring plugins in the application builder

2.3.7   Submitting your edge application

2.4   Building an edge application

2.4.1   Cloning the example plugin

2.4.2   Modifying the example plugin code

2.4.3   Compiling and building your customized filerepo plugin

2.4.4   Launching your custom application

2.5   Summary