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Unreliable Internet

For some edge systems, the Internet connection for the Cluster may not be available 24/7. Some situations where this is the case could be;

  1. The Cluster is located where the Internet is either unreliable and patchy, especially if it is connected to traditional Satellite, starlink or moving through remote areas on 4G/5G.
  2. The Internet is only available at set times each day/week
  3. The Internet is only available when a roaming asset returns to a fixed location (for example if the Cluster is located in a Truck that works temporarily at different projects and returns to base upon completion of the project)

In all these cases, the Clusters is resilient to interruptions to Internet connections between the Edge Cluster and the Cloud.

Both at the Edge and in the Cloud actions or data that is produced will be stored and transferred once the Internet connection is restored.

If all the necessary Connections and Kelvin SmartApps™ are deployed to a Cluster or multiple Clusters that are connected through a local LAN connection, Kelvin SmartApps™ can run independently and communicate to the Assets available on the LAN.

Nats Broker in Cluster

The Nats Broker in the Cluster at the edge is used as a communication and temporary store buffer for the data when communications to the Cloud is slow or broken.

This guarantees that you will not lose data.

It can store data for up to 1 year or up to 5 GB, whichever comes first. When communications is restored, the stored data will be sent to the Cloud and the local database is cleared.

Kelvin Cloud

Kelvin Cloud continuously monitors the health of the connection to all Clusters and Nodes.

If the communications to a Cluster is temporarily disconnected then any actions that users perform, like deploying a new Kelvin SmartApps™ or updating Asset / Data Stream data, the actions will be queued and automatically applied when the Cluster is next online.

Upgrading

When you are upgrading either the custom Kelvin pods or Kelvin SmartApps™, Docker Apps or Connections, you have the option on how you want to perform the upgrades.

In cases where the Internet is only active at set times or the Internet is unreliable you can turn off automatic upgrades and initiate upgrades manually when you know the Internet connection is active and/or stable.

There are a range of manual upgrade options, but in cases of Internet unreliability we recommend that you set staged to true when starting the manual upgrade process to ensure all apps requiring upgrades is downloaded first before being applied.

You can then also select instantly_apply to true or false depending on whether you want to upgrade all the apps immediately after download or to manually initiate the upgrades at your discretion. This will ensure a smooth upgrade process and avoid reliance on the Internet during the crucial actual upgrade process.

You can read the full options available for Stages Workloads by following this link.