Izuma Networks: Micro Data Centers

Change the way you manage applications at small data centers. Focus your clusters around their business purposes instead of where the actual hardware resides.

Partition systems better Often completely disparate systems are running in your small / regional data centers. And these systems should not really be under the same management systems or k8s cluster. However, often MDC operators end up placing services in the same cluster for management ease. Izuma Cloud + Izuma Edge allow you to manage multiple site’s systems under a single cluster. This eases management overhead, allowing you to break out clusters by purpose not physical location.

Spread services across MDCs Becasue Izuma Edge machines at each individual MDC can be a part of a single cluster, applications can utilize all MDCs for compute and availability. Utilize the hardware you have at each location to improve durability and scalability of services.

Less load on IT staff Anytime you can consolidate the number of remote clusters at a small data center you decrease the load on your staff. Izuma Edge remote nodes have an entire systems management component. Virtual or physical machines running Izuma Edge are a part of a single k8s cluster, decreasing the need to shell into remote clusters and handle basic system administration.

Improve security on remote machines Izuma Edge, whether running on a physical or virtual machine, provides device identity and root-of-trust hardware support. These features are used for validating container signatures and can be utilized by your own application for TLS communication and signature validations. All application traffic can be routed through your Izuma Cloud instance, using dual handshake TLS, validated by hardware root of trust, which will decrease your network attack surface.

Using Izuma Cloud & Izuma Edge for MDC deployments

In the below simplified example, we have a hypothetical “operations” and “finance” set of applications. These two major sets of applications are under different management teams, have different end-users, and have different security policies. In a traditional MDC systems using Kubernetes clusters, an individual local k8s cluster would be deployed at each MDC.

In reality multiple k8s clusters might be deplyed at each location. The Kubernetres flavor could be an “edge” oriented k8s variatin such as k3s or microk8s. In order to manage all these clusters the staff had best employee some sort of “multicloud” software set, sometimes termed Multicloud Networking Software or MCNS. This means using a propritary, non-k8s API to manage all your clusters.

The amount of clusters in this design is what drives the complexity. And many clusters are needed in order to manage applications at each site.

Izuma Cloud allows clusters to have nodes which run in multiple physical networks and at many locations. Using this capability the design can be simplifed:

Here we have taken what was at least 6 clusters plus a multicloud services API and turned it into just 2 clusters: one for operations and one for finance.

Since Izuma Cloud instances are still true k8s clusters, this solution can still be used with a multicloud solution if desired. Each Izuma Cloud instance can be managed entirely separately if needed or managed by the same team.

And a new micro data center location can be setup very quickly. No new cluster needs to be built. Machines simply need to have Izuma Edge installed and attached to the existing cluster.

Micro Data Centers

Modernize management of applications & services at MDCs using Izuma Cloud's Edge-as-a-Service.

Micro Data Centers

Modernize management of applications & services at MDCs using Izuma Cloud's Edge-as-a-Service.

Using Izuma Cloud & Izuma Edge for MDC deployments