Container management is one of the main features enabled by the Edge Device Management package.

The actual container management functionality is part of the Bosch IoT Edge product. However, Remote Manager provides components which are an indispensable part of this integration and workflow.

Concepts

How the communication works?

When we talk about container management in this use case we can recognize three important elements:

  • the new functionality in Bosch IoT Remote Manager

  • the northbound integration with Bosch IoT Rollouts

  • the southbound integration with Bosch IoT Edge

These three elements enable the complete workflow for OCI containers lifecycle management in a secure manner.

Remote Manager provides an integration with Bosch IoT Edge's container management. Bosch IoT Edge's container management is integrated in Remote manager as a Control Unit just like any other type of device. This allows you to send container-related commands to Bosch IoT Edge.

The whole workflow is highly secured as there are no external resources or communication needed. All necessary communication is happening between Rollouts, Remote Manager and Edge. Images could be imported only via a secure communication channel and Bosch IoT Edge is not able to upload any artefacts.

OCI Registry

The OCI registry partially implements the OCI distribution specification and its pull workflow in particular.

See specification at https://github.com/opencontainers/distribution-spec/blob/main/spec.md

This allows the Edge to use Remote Registry as a trusted registry and download OCI container images.

Software Repository plugins

Remote Manager supports import and identification of OCI images in the form of tar archives thanks to two plugins part of the Software Repository. These are:

  • OCI Container Artefact Plugin - Simplifies importing and downloading of JSON-based OCI container descriptors supported by Bosch IoT Edge.

  • OCI Image Artefact Plugin - Enables importing of OCI-compliant container images as tar archives to be downloaded via the OCI registry.

Uploading guide

Uploading an OCI container to Bosch IoT Rollouts and distributing it to devices running Bosch IoT Edge via Remote Manager is quite standard.

You may follow our Perform a Firmware Update guide but be aware that:

  • you should use container instead of firmware as software type.

  • in contrast to the firmware package we upload when performing firmware updates, here we create a software module with container descriptor and image archive.