Tagging

In ZEDEDA Cloud, tagging is one of the fundamental mechanisms you can use to assign descriptive metadata labels to your resources. These labels are typically in a key-value pair format, such as location:factory-A. Tags help you organize, filter, and apply policies across your edge nodes and applications. And by effectively using tags, you can simplify the management of your infrastructure and enhance the efficiency of your edge deployments.

Understanding Tags

Tags provide a flexible way to add your own custom attributes to ZEDEDA resources. Think of them as customizable labels that you can attach to edge nodes (devices), projects, applications, and other entities within the ZEDEDA platform. This approach enables you to create a customized classification system for your specific needs, helping you move beyond the platform's predefined categories.

Consistent use of tags allows you to:

• Organize resources: Group similar devices or applications for easier management.
• Improve searchability: Quickly find specific resources based on their tags.
• Automate deployments: Target specific sets of devices for application deployments or configuration updates.
• Implement granular policies: Control resource access and behavior based on tag assignments.

Key Applications of Tagging in ZEDEDA

Tagging is not a monolithic feature but rather a versatile tool that can be applied across various aspects of the ZEDEDA Cloud platform. Here’s how you can use tagging in different settings:

Edge Node Tagging

You can assign tags directly to your edge nodes. This is invaluable for categorizing nodes based on criteria such as:

• Geography: region:emea, city:london
• Hardware attributes: model:imx8, has_gpu:true
• Functional roles: role:pos-terminal, function:cctv-gateway
• Development stage: status:production, env:testing
• Two-node HA: tie-breaker:true

These node tags are then used by other ZEDEDA services to make decisions. For example, you can use tags to ensure that an application that requires specific hardware only gets deployed to the nodes that have been tagged appropriately.

Project Tagging and Resource Isolation

Projects serve as the main organizational containers. While projects themselves can have descriptive tags for your reference, a central use of tagging in this context is the deployment tags associated with a particular project.

• Project Tags: You assign edge nodes to projects during onboarding. The project tag identifies the purpose of the project (for example., department:retail and store_type:mall). This approach can be helpful if you have multiple departments that must be kept separate from one another. Within the project configuration there are other tags, such as the policy tag and deployment tag. These additional tags determine which initial configuration the node receives for its networking and volume settings, and which edge apps are deployed to the node.

Application Deployment Control

Tags control where your edge applications get deployed. When you define an application deployment in ZEDEDA Cloud:

• Targeting with Tags: You specify "deployment tags" that edge nodes must have for an application to be installed on those nodes. This allows you to precisely target your edge app deployments. For instance, you could deploy a video analytics edge application only for the edge nodes that have been tagged with camera_connected:true and compute_tier:high.
• Creating a foundation with Tags: Before you can deploy apps to your edge node, you can use tags for more advanced use cases, such as building and managing Kubernetes clusters at the edge. Once the Kubernetes clusters exist, you can deploy apps to the nodes in those clusters. For details about using tags in clustering, see Kubernetes Infrastructure Orchestration - Operations. 

Network Configuration and Segmentation

You can use tags to manage network configurations for your edge nodes. When setting up a network instance, like a local network for your applications or a connection to a cloud service:

• Tag-Based Network Association: You can configure network instances to automatically attach to edge nodes that have specific tags. This enables dynamic network provisioning and segmentation based on roles or locations (in other words, all nodes tagged machine_type:cnc will get access to a specific operational technology network).

Tagging Use Cases at a Glance

The following table summarizes common ways tagging is used within the ZEDEDA platform.