Table of Contents

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Introduction

ELIOT is "Enterprise Edge Lightweight and IOT" project under Akraino approved blueprint family and part of Akraino Edge Stack, which intends to provide an platform  for a fully integrated edge network infrastructure and running edge computing applications, on lightweight Edge Nodes. ELIOT targets on making the edge node a lightweight software stack which can be deployed on edge nodes which have limited hardware capacity by leveraging lightweight OS, a container running environment and container orchestration applications.

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ELIOT IoT Gateway Blueprint  Architecture consists of an ELIOT Manager and multiple ELIOT Nodes (edge nodes). The scale of ELIOT (edge) Nodes can range from 1 single node to 10, 100, 1K or more. For development environment we have tested with one ELIOT Manager Node and two ELIOT Worker Nodes.

ELIOT Manager is the central controller which manages the orchestration, life cycle, management and networking of edge nodes (IoT Gateway). It can be installed on a bare metal server or cloud VM with Ubuntu 16.04 /18.04 or Cent OS 7.5 version (currently supported OS in IoT Gateway Blueprint).

The node  Kubernetes Master (kubeadm, kubectl, kubelet), Kubeedge-EdgeController node ELIOT Manager  is to facilitate auto deploy, high availability, orchestration, self-healing of the IoT Gateway Nodes.

ELIOT Nodes - IoT Gateway are Edge compute processing nodes which will provide the hardware and the software stack for deploying IoT applications. 

In Release 2.0 IoT Gateway Blueprint to deploy native containerized application on the IoT Gateway Nodes have used 

• Kubernetes
• KubeEdge (Internally it uses Kubernetes)

The IoT Gateway can function as a Kubernetes worker node or a KubeEdge - Edge node when used as Kubernetes or KubeEdge respectively.

IoT Gateway blueprint is integrated with EdgeX foundry platform , thus  giving an platform to deploy IoT applications.

As the edge nodes can have restricted hardware resources of CPU , Memory etc, ELIOT uses ELIOT Minimal OS for the Edge nodes which is basically tailored version of Cent OS.  ELIOT Minimal OS is a lightweight OS suitable for ELIOT Edge nodes.

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Many cloud native monitoring applications can be used to collect container matrix and show them in a graphical manner, like cadvisor , grafana , prometheusprometheus.

The overall architecture In Release 2.0 is same as Release 1.0 architecture,  there are enhancements  added in the Release 2.0 which are listed below :

• Deployment of ELIOT Platform on Tailored OS.
• Integrated with EdgeX foundry platform.
• Integration with OPC-UA (unified protocol framework for IoT Devices).

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Platform Architecture

ELIOT IoT Gateway is focusing on providing a platform stack on which IoT applications can be deployed, monitored and scale.  The detailed platform architecture of IoT Gateway blueprint is shown in the below diagram.

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ELIOT Manager

ELIOT Portal: 

ELIOT Portal is new feature added on the ELIOT Blueprint which is currently applicable for both IoT Gateway and uCPE Blueprint. ELIOT Portal main objective is  to have a dashboard for operations and management of ELIOT Cluster. It consists of ELIOT UI and ELIOT API Gateway.

In  Release 2.0 the portal is giving the following operations:-

1. Display ELIOT Nodes
2. Display ELIOT Services
3. Display ELIOT PODS. 

Other options like Application Deployments,   are currently in design phase, which will be developed for future releases.

ELIOT CLI: 

ELIOT CLI (Command Line Interface) is a new feature added in ELIOT Blueprint which is currently applicable only for IoT Gateway Blueprint.  It is providing a command line interface option to setup the ELIOT Cluster. Currently this feature is supported only for Ubuntu OS.

The ELIOT CLI application currently provides the following operations:

1. ELIOT Cluster Setup.
2. ELIOT Cluster Cleanup.
3. ELIOT Cluster Reset.

Node Monitoring: 

Node Monitoring main task is to collect the container performance metrics from various IoT Gateway Nodes and display on a dashboard in graphical representation. 

Network Controller & Node Resource Manager:

The core part of the ELIOT Cluster which controls the Node health, high availability , overlay networking , cluster management. To manage the same Kubernetes and KubeEdge are being used for Node Resource Management with Calico for Container Networking.<Hardware components should be specified with model numbers, part numbers, etc>

Software Platform Architecture

ELIOT Blueprint Overall Software Stack Architecture

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ELIOT Manager

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ELIOT Edge Node - IoT Gateway Node

APIs

Not Applicable

Hardware and Software Management

Currently in IoT Gateway Blueprint virtual machines are being used in public cloud. Currently no dedicated bare metal are being used.

Software Management:-

ELIOT gerrit

Licensing

• GNU/common license

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