Day 2 in IoTOps
We already covered how to use Kubernetes and Raspberry Pis as a framework for creating and delivering your IoT solution. So now that that’s done it is time to test, monitor, manage and deploy upgrades to each of those edge devices out there. Here we will tell you how we manage to do that with a 0 dollar budget.
Perhaps if you are new to this whole thing you may be comfortable reaching your devices with and ssh tunnel, perhaps you even use sshuttle. But you will eventually find out that those methods/tools do not escalate very nice. Also, these edge devices may need to reach out to each other to share information, to upgrade, to check availability and so on and so forth.
Here are just two reasons for the devices to be interconnected. And there are out there several VPN providers that could help you solve this issue. Most of them will even let you try their solution for free for a specific amount of time, but after that you will have to pay. Which is not ideal when you are on a startup.
Apart from that with a VPN you lose track of where your traffic is going, but we will leave this item for another article in the future.
Another option is to spawn an open VPN server and have the edge devices connected to this server. This will add another node to manage.
As promised, the solution (or at least our solution): ZeroTier
I could try to explain what it is but lets rather let Adam Ierymenko explain: ZeroTier virtual networks are like chat rooms for machines. Just create virtual networks, join them from your devices and systems, approve authorization for the things you’ve added, and you’re done!
With this approach, all the connected devices will be reachable within the same network. At this point you can ssh into the device using the ZeroTier ip address or have Kubernetes kubelet service to reach the cluster master over the ZeroTier virtual network.
Zerotier is a different approach to VPN, it requires no cost up front, and it’s free to use. It is also simple to manage and use, in fact once its installed, up and running you will forget it’s there. It requires no UI. It supports all relevant architectures. I strongly encourage you to try ZeroTier and start playing with it, we will get back with another article in the future showing the advance features of ZeroTier such as flow rules, multipathing and more.
