FleetifAI is a platform for managing distributed Linux edge infrastructure, being built as an independent product in the IoTOcean portfolio. It is aimed at teams that run gateways and small computers out in the field, in buildings, shops, vehicles or industrial sites, and need to keep their software up to date and their devices healthy without travelling to each one.
The problem
Edge devices are easy to deploy and hard to look after. Once a gateway is installed in a cabinet somewhere, every update, configuration change or fault becomes a remote job, often over a network you do not control. Applications are installed by hand, devices end up running different versions, and when something stops working the first question is how to reach the device at all. The more devices there are, the more of the team’s time goes into keeping them running instead of improving what they do.
How FleetifAI approaches it
FleetifAI treats edge devices as one fleet rather than many individual machines. Applications are planned to be packaged and run as Docker containers, so the same workload can be rolled out to many gateways in a consistent way. Devices are planned to connect back over WireGuard, giving operators a secure path for remote operations and diagnostics even when the device sits behind someone else’s network.
For the operating system, FleetifAI is designed to integrate with Flatcar Linux, a minimal, container-focused Linux distribution that suits devices which should change as little as possible between updates. An extensible plugin framework is planned for connecting IoT hardware and protocols without changing the core of the platform.
What is being built now
FleetifAI is in development. The work in progress covers:
- edge gateway fleet management;
- Flatcar Linux integration;
- Docker application orchestration across devices;
- secure WireGuard connectivity to every device;
- remote operations and diagnostics;
- device supervision and monitoring;
- an extensible IoT plugin framework.
None of these capabilities is presented as finished yet. Progress will be shared in the IoTOcean Journal as the work moves forward. If you run edge devices and want to talk about what you need, get in touch.
