Overview

The adoption of cloud technologies and cloud-based services is rising constantly, but there are many situations where you need to run an application locally, for example, because of regulatory, security or performance reasons. Great Bear gives you the ability to develop and run modern applications at the edge by bringing the resilience and flexibility of the cloud to the edge.

Great Bear is a management system for edge devices, and focuses on application development, deployment, and lifecycle management. Great Bear focuses on the user experience, hiding the complexity of cloud-native technologies behind intuitive and accessible user interfaces and processes.

Even though edge devices often have limited resources, Great Bear is designed from the ground up with scalability in mind, allowing you to manage application deployments across several nodes per sites easily, even across thousands of sites.

Great Bear provides different layers to manage the different aspects of the solution:

• A Software-as-a-Service control plane that allows you to manage and control your sites, devices, and deployed applications.
• An application store for easy access of the applications you can deploy on your sites.
• A cloud-type SDK and API that allows you and also Independent Software Vendors to rapidly develop applications for the edge, and make them accessible in the application store.

In Great Bear, a Node is a physical or virtual edge device that can run Kubernetes. You can group the nodes into logical units called Sites. For example, you can create sites based on the physical location of your facilities and assign every node to the site where it is located.

The Great Bear control plane is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that is running in the cloud and communicates with your sites, allowing you to manage your Great Bear nodes, sites, and applications. The control plane provides access to the application marketplace, where you can select the applications you want to deploy to one or more of your sites. Great Bear takes care of deploying and running the applications on the selected sites and keeps them running, for example, redeploys applications if a node fails, and optimally manages the resource requirements of the applications on the available nodes.

If you want to develop your own applications, Great Bear provides an SDK that allows you to access services that are usable by the applications, and a way to upload your applications to the application store.

For more details, see Technical Overview.