Advantech WISE-PaaS 4.0 is now available, accelerating the development of AIoT industry applications

Since its launch, Advantech's WISE-PaaS industrial IoT cloud platform has been committed to empowering industrial IoT solution providers and accelerating the digital transformation of various industries, growing together with partners. Today, Advantech has upgraded WISE-PaaS to version 4.0 with Kubernetes (K8s), which is closer to the market development direction, to provide users with more flexible and diverse service modules and development tools.

To help enterprises accelerate the creation of innovative AIoT applications, Advantech has been committed to promoting the WISE-PaaS industrial IoT cloud platform in recent years. It has built functional modules such as data visualization, asset performance management (APM), and AI model training and deployment framework service (AFS) on the platform, which has won the favor of AIoT application developers and vertical industry system integrators (Domain-focused Solution Integrators; DFSI).

In order to further optimize the subscription, deployment, listing and customization processes of Industrial Apps (I.App) and help developers and DFSI accelerate the construction of AIoT industry solutions, Advantech launched a major project last year (2019) to convert the underlying technical architecture of the WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS cloud platform from the original Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes (hereinafter referred to as K8s); in March 2020, the K8s-based WISE-PaaS 4.0 was officially upgraded and released.

K8s elastic empowerment to meet the diverse needs of users

Advantech WISE-PaaS solution architect Ye Yixian said that looking at the WISE-PaaS architecture, WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS is positioned as a data platform, which is intended to help developers effectively manage computing resources. The original intention of building the WISE-PaaS cloud platform is to be able to span multiple application scenarios of private and public clouds and provide a consistent operating experience. Its WISE-STACK private cloud solution can be deployed locally by users. However, as the platform is promoted, many users have reported that the huge Cloud Foundry platform has high requirements for specifications and expects Advantech to provide a lighter solution. Through a re-evaluation of the underlying technology, Advantech finally selected K8s, which continues to gain popularity in the market. It is known as the mainstream technical standard for collaborative management of containerized resources today.

Ye Yixian concluded that there are three types of customer groups that are most suitable for adopting WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS 4.0:

The first category is developers. Because WISE-PaaS is a cross-cloud platform that provides a unified development environment, developers only need to develop a solution once through this platform without repeated development, and it can run on public and private clouds at the same time, and can be deployed in different IaaS environments for multi-cloud management. In addition, K8s has a certain technical threshold, and often requires underlying operations through the Command Line. WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS provides UI as much as possible to reduce the frequency of developers typing commands, greatly improving the convenience of use.

The second type of user is DFSI. In the WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS 3.0 era, a registered user only had one EnSaaS environment, so DFSI had to aggregate the resource requirements of each scenario, open a large space, and then share it with different customers; today's WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS 4.0 truly implements the concept of "multi-tenant management". DFSI can subscribe to multiple resource spaces with a single registered user, similar to agency sales or resale practices, to meet the needs of different scenarios, and business flexibility is also higher. More importantly, with the emergence of WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS 4.0, the new concepts of "decoupling" and "reconstruction" have been introduced to the WISE-PaaS platform. Whether it is an industrial app or an underlying resource service, it can be transformed into a small building block component and recommended for external subscription through the WISE-Marketplace IoT cloud market, making it easier for DFSI to build different solutions that accurately meet the needs of each scenario.

The third type of users are enterprise IT managers, who can use WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS to meet the monitoring and alarm needs of the industrial IoT infrastructure, significantly reduce the operation and maintenance burden, and quickly provide developers with a highly available and elastically scalable application development and deployment environment.

WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS 4.0 high-availability and diversified services accelerate SaaS service operations

Ye Yixian said that compared with other industrial IoT cloud platforms, the biggest highlight of WISE-PaaS is that it can provide fast connection from edge to cloud. From edge devices to various cloud services, they are highly integrated with each other developed by Advantech, so they can create an "out-of-the-box" user experience. Advantech also hopes that industrial apps can meet 70%~80% of development needs as much as possible. DFSI only requires a small amount of customization and does not require writing a lot of code to quickly complete the solution construction.

Entering the WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS 4.0 era, WISE-PaaS has more abundant nutrients than in the past, including seamless integration of end-cloud data, integrability of industrial apps, ease of use and efficiency improvement of low-code and guided configuration, and the provision of multiple application framework services such as visualization, APM, AFS, etc., which can accelerate the development and operation of industrial apps.

Some people may be curious. Many IaaS providers also provide K8s services. What is the difference between WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS 4.0 and them? Ye Yixian explained that from the perspective of K8s development environment alone, the service content of each platform is not much different, but if the developer wants to convert the development results into SaaS services and provide them to the outside world, then he needs to use many intermediate services, including multi-tenant space permissions and quota management, routing management, APIM, monitoring, logging, information security (such as code vulnerability scanning, key library), and even the life cycle management mechanisms such as listing, subscription, automatic activation, upgrade, downgrade, and cancellation required for operating cloud services, as well as metering, pricing and billing functions; all of these do not exist in the K8s service content of general IaaS providers, but are all included in WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS 4.0. In addition, WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS 4.0 uses a three-layer multi-tenant design (i.e. Cluster, Workspace, Namespace) that is different from the general K8s environment, providing multi-tenant management flexibility that can meet various business needs.

WISE-Marketplace IoT cloud market accelerates the implementation of innovative applications of industrial IoT

In addition, WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS 4.0 includes a mechanism that is linked to the WISE-Marketplace IoT cloud market, including Catalog Service, Listing Service, etc. Users can quickly search and subscribe to I.App or underlying resource services in WISE-Marketplace directly through the EnSaaS management interface. For operators who intend to operate SaaS business, it makes the channels for implementing solutions more diverse and speeds up market promotion.

WISE-Marketplace is a capability trading platform for industrial IoT solutions launched by Advantech in 2020. It aims to create "integrable" industrial apps for customers to subscribe to and invite more ecosystem partners to list their solutions. WISE-Marketplace functions include edge function modules (Edge.SRP), middle platform (Common App), industry general apps (Industry App), industry-specific apps (Domain-Focused App), AI modules, consulting services and education and training, etc.

Looking ahead, Advantech plans to make WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS easier to use. When users need to upgrade code, they can use DevOps-related functions to immediately trigger a series of processes such as environment verification, containerization, automatic deployment of cloud computing resources, and automatic deployment to the K8s environment, thereby reducing the basic workload to a minimum and allowing users to truly focus on service innovation.

In general, the K8s-based WISE-PaaS industrial IoT cloud platform, with its advantages of microservice elasticity, out-of-the-box functions and developer ecosystem, helps developers accelerate the construction of I.App, and with perfect mechanisms such as multi-tenant design that can flexibly support different business models, it helps service providers operate smoothly. Furthermore, through the WISE-Marketplace IoT cloud market, a business platform for enterprise value exchange is created to ensure that I.App is traded and delivered smoothly, and service providers from various industries are invited to list on the platform, accelerating the interoperability and promotion between different DFSIs, and helping the implementation of diversified innovative applications in the industrial IoT industry.