Major release: StaexD — a fully distributed and decentralized P2P container orchestrator

2022-08-11

Today we are announcing a new version of StaexD — an orchestrator for our IoT and robotics platform. The orchestrator automates the deployment of applications to IoT devices and other machines, remotely manages systems of IoT devices without requiring SSH access, and seamlessly connects applications together over an overlay StaexMCC network without the need for manual configurations.

We have exciting news! Today we are announcing a new version of StaexD — an orchestrator for our IoT and robotics platform. The orchestrator automates the deployment of applications to IoT devices and other machines, remotely manages systems of IoT devices without requiring SSH access, and seamlessly connects applications together over an overlay StaexMCC network without the need for manual configurations.

The new version features the following improvements.

• 80% smaller binary size and 50% smaller memory footprint. Thanks to the efficient low-level Rust language, in which the new version is written, we reduced the binary size to a few megabytes and also cut down on memory usage. Now even the smallest device can comfortably run our software and allocate the vast majority of its resources for important business-related applications.
• Energy-efficient application scheduler. We rewrote our application scheduler from scratch to optimize for battery-powered devices. We removed most of the periodic resource-consuming actions, minimized the amount of data sent over the network, and the frequency of network communications. Now CPUs and other on-board devices have more opportunities to go into power-saving mode.
• Datacenter-grade automation with or without application containers. The orchestrator can deploy and connect applications directly to each other over an overlay network using a simple configuration file and REST API. This is a common feature for datacenter-grade application container management software like Kubernetes. The difference is that our software does this with or without containers. For lightweight IoT and robotic platforms this feature provides a higher-than-average level of automation and allows you to manage a device fleet the same way as you manage servers in the cloud.
• Fully-distributed and fault-resilient scheduler. The new orchestrator has no single point of failure, no central server and does not use a costly distributed consensus algorithm for the synchronization. This allows the system of IoT devices to be fully-contained without the need for the dedicated management server.

We will be hosting a webinar on Wednesday, the 17^th of August at 16:00 CEST where we will explain and demonstrate the features of StaexD. You can register quickly here: https://staex.io/announcing-staexd

Reach out to us to learn more about how to bring high-performance, fully decentralized orchestration to your robotics and IoT projects!

Staex is a secure public network for IoT devices that can not run a VPN such as smart meters, IP cameras, and EV chargers. Staex encrypts legacy protocols, reduces mobile data usage, and simplifies building networks with complex topologies through its unique multi-hop architecture. Staex is fully zero-trust meaning that no traffic is allowed unless specified by the device owner which makes it more secure than even some private networks. With this, Staex creates an additional separation layer to provide more security for IoT devices on the Internet, also protecting other Internet services from DDoS attacks that are usually executed on millions of IoT machines.

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