Energy Sector Edge Computing

Technical Architecture Overview

This guide covers implementing DevOps practices for managing thousands of edge devices (PLCs, RTUs, IoT gateways) in energy sector environments.

Core Infrastructure Components

graph TD
    A[Edge Devices] -->|Metrics/Logs| B[Collectors]
    B -->|Forward| C[Central Monitoring]
    A -->|Config Updates| D[Config Management]
    D -->|Apply| A
    E[Git Repos] -->|Trigger| F[CI/CD Pipelines]
    F -->|Deploy| D

Implementation Guide

1. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Setup

# modules/edge_device/main.tf
module "edge_fleet" {
  source = "./modules/edge-fleet"
  
  fleet_config = {
    device_count = 1000
    regions      = ["us-east-1", "us-west-2"]
    monitoring   = true
    tags = {
      environment = "production"
      type       = "plc-gateway"
    }
  }

  security_config = {
    enable_encryption = true
    rotation_period  = "72h"
    allowed_networks = ["10.0.0.0/8"]
  }
}

2. Monitoring Stack

# prometheus/edge-exporters.yml
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'edge-fleet'
    scrape_interval: 30s
    static_configs:
      - targets:
        - 'edge-001.internal:9100'
        - 'edge-002.internal:9100'
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__address__]
        regex: '(edge-\d+)\..*'
        target_label: device_id

# grafana/alerts.yml
groups:
- name: edge-fleet
  rules:
  - alert: EdgeDeviceOffline
    expr: up{job="edge-fleet"} == 0
    for: 5m
    annotations:
      summary: "Edge device {{ $labels.device_id }} offline"

3. Configuration Management

# ansible/roles/edge-config/tasks/main.yml
- name: Update Edge Device Configuration
  hosts: edge_devices
  become: yes
  tasks:
    - name: Ensure baseline config
      template:
        src: templates/device-config.j2
        dest: /etc/edge/config.yaml
        validate: /usr/local/bin/edge-validate --config %s
      notify: restart edge service

    - name: Apply security policies
      ansible.builtin.include_role:
        name: security-baseline

handlers:
    - name: restart edge service
      systemd:
        name: edge-agent
        state: restarted

4. CI/CD Pipeline

# .github/workflows/edge-config-deploy.yml
name: Edge Config Deployment
on:
  push:
    paths:
      - 'edge-configs/**'
jobs:
  validate:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Validate Configs
        run: |
          for config in edge-configs/*; do
            edge-validate $config
          done
  deploy:
    needs: validate
    runs-on: self-hosted
    steps:
      - name: Deploy to Canary
        run: ansible-playbook -i inventory/canary deploy.yml
      - name: Run Health Checks
        run: ./scripts/health-check.sh
      - name: Deploy to Production
        if: success()
        run: ansible-playbook -i inventory/prod deploy.yml

SRE Best Practices

SLO Implementation

# prometheus/slo.yml
groups:
- name: edge-slos
  rules:
  - record: edge:uptime:ratio
    expr: |
      sum(rate(edge_uptime_total[24h])) 
      / 
      sum(rate(edge_uptime_total[24h])) + sum(rate(edge_downtime_total[24h]))

  - alert: SLOBudgetBurn
    expr: |
      edge:uptime:ratio < 0.995
    for: 1h

Automation Runbooks

# runbooks/auto_remediation.py
def handle_device_offline(device_id):
    # 1. Check connectivity
    if not check_network(device_id):
        trigger_network_reset(device_id)
    
    # 2. Verify configuration
    if detect_config_drift(device_id):
        apply_baseline_config(device_id)
    
    # 3. Update status
    update_incident_status(device_id)

Toil Reduction Matrix

Task
Before
After
Automation Method

Device Onboarding

Manual (30min/device)

Automated (2min/device)

Terraform + Ansible

Config Updates

SSH + Manual Changes

GitOps Pipeline

GitHub Actions + Ansible

Incident Response

Manual Investigation

Auto-remediation

Python + AWS Lambda

Patch Management

Scheduled Downtime

Rolling Updates

Kubernetes Operators

References

PreviousPublic Sector (UK/EU)NextPlatform Engineering

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