The field of edge computing is very loosely defined, as opposed to the well--established terms used in the modern cloud. Most forays into creating new solutions base themselves in IoT and then occasionally provide the ability to process data at the edge, but are then constrained to processing only data coming from sensors.
Through an extensive overview of literature and existing implementations, we find that no current solution encompasses the area of edge infrastructures, which are lower--level than application platforms. We design and implement our own solution for managing edge devices and enable transparent management through Ansible AWX, an existing tool for machine configuration management.
The implementation, dubbed mast, provides device onboarding, networking, security, storage and time synchronisation to devices in the cluster, and allows a straightforward extension of the cloud paradigm. The evaluation shows that, compared to existing platforms, mast provides a novel and powerful method of managing edge devices, regardless of the workload running on them.
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