CATEGORIES: Redstone Realm, Governance & Best Practices.

There are a couple of business cases that are required to comply with strict country regulations, such as keeping data in a specific location or region, or reducing delays between inter-service communication by hosting critical parts of the infrastructure close. 

In business, it’s called “Bring Your Own Server” (BYOS), which means using your own hardware with a provider’s infrastructure (like a data center or cloud) for hosting, or a Hybrid Cloud approach. 

In our project, we are using our own K8S cluster, which hosts microservices on the customer site, its allow us to build the solution that will even work during a lost internet connection without stopping the processes.  

Big customers which are owning a huge amount of 3d printers/farms require extra government and management capabilities. It can be covered by edge IoT gateways on the client side. At the same time, it still requires seamless Azure integration, which can cover the security model part. 
 
IP owners licensing digital inventory – where manufacturers grant printing rights instead of shipping physical parts – often have stringent data sovereignty requirements (research), making our hybrid approach essential for industries like defense and aerospace.” 

Hopefully, Microsoft already has an approach for that case, it’s called Azure Local.  

Azure Local is the new, unified branding for what was previously known as Azure Stack HCI, extending Azure services to your own infrastructure for hybrid cloud management, while Azure Stack HCI was the specific hyper-converged solution.

 
 
Technical implementation  

As an edge device, we are using Sipeed Nano Cluster, which is the basis for several Raspberry Pi CM5 modules.  

High-Level diagram 

In our case we are hosting the following services: 

Core microservices responsible for: 

• 3D printer orchestration and job scheduling 

• Print pipeline execution and real-time monitoring 

• Device control, firmware integration, and safety checks 

Edge IoT gateway services: 

• Secure printer and sensor connectivity 

• Local buffering and processing of telemetry data 

Following that approach, we are receiving all the benefits of the cloud and private cloud.