SLATE blog

Kubernetes (K8s) is a powerful container orchestration tool. k3s is a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes that strips away a number of features while remaining fully compliant with up-stream Kubernetes. It allows easier deployment when compared to kubeadm and all in a binary less than 40MB. k3s is a fantastic solution for deploying Kubernetes with SLATE on smaller devices, older hardware, and even IOT. In this blog post, we explain how a k3s and SLATE can provide a tidy, lightweight edge federation.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging technology that allows network administrators to programmatically manage network devices in a dynamic and cloud-like manner. Faucet is an SDN controller that utilizes the OpenFlow protocol to enable managing devices in such a way. We have been working on packaging Faucet as a SLATE application to empower sites to experiment with this exciting new technology. In this post, we’ll explain the process of configuring, deploying and connecting a Faucet controller through the SLATE platform.

This is the first in our series of roughly quarterly release notes for activities in the SLATE project. We have a whole slew of changes across all aspects of SLATE, including a revamped web experience, client/server improvements, better tooling, more applications, and new sites added to the Federation.

Kubernetes supports multiple container runtimes through its Container Runtime Interface (CRI). As a result, besides the typical default choice of Docker (containerd) one can also use a variety of other drop-in replacements, such as cri-o. This article will discuss another option, namely Singularity.

Network testing is hugely important to diagnose problems within and between sites. We’re trying to make network diagnostics dead simple with SLATE, and to do that we’ve SLATE-ified pieces of the excellent perfSONAR software stack. This application has recently landed into the SLATE stable catalog, and so we thought we would give you a little tour of this handy tool!

Jason Stidd and Chris Weaver of the SLATE team both presented papers at PEARC19. The talks were on July 30 and July 31:

Developing and Operating Edge Services on Federated Infrastructure Using MiniSLATE (presentation)

Managing Privilege and Access on Federated Edge Platforms (presentation)

This whitepaper how applications are managed on a federated research platform. The intended end result is that an application administrator can deploy an application to an edge cluster in a trusted manner.

We describe progress on building the SLATE (Services Layer at the Edge) platform.