Learning Library

← Back to Library

Deploying IBM Cloud Satellite on Intel NUCs

Key Points

  • Jake Kitchener, a Senior Technical Staff member and Lead Architect at IBM, introduces IBM Cloud Satellite as a platform that extends IBM Cloud services to infrastructure outside IBM’s own data centers.
  • IBM Cloud Satellite enables consumption of cloud services close to where data resides—whether on‑premises, in another cloud provider, or at edge locations like a desktop desk.
  • In the demo, Jake uses three Intel NUCs to create a Satellite “location,” showing how distributed cloud can be deployed on small, edge‑style hardware.
  • He walks through the process of creating the location in the IBM Cloud console, attaching hosts by downloading and applying a post‑provisioning script, and bootstrapping the NUCs with a custom image via USB to achieve a highly available setup.
  • Finally, he designates one of the NUCs as the Satellite Control Plane, establishing a secure management layer for running IBM Cloud services within the new Satellite location.

Full Transcript

# Deploying IBM Cloud Satellite on Intel NUCs **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WNjwlN5gMk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WNjwlN5gMk) **Duration:** 00:05:02 ## Summary - Jake Kitchener, a Senior Technical Staff member and Lead Architect at IBM, introduces IBM Cloud Satellite as a platform that extends IBM Cloud services to infrastructure outside IBM’s own data centers. - IBM Cloud Satellite enables consumption of cloud services close to where data resides—whether on‑premises, in another cloud provider, or at edge locations like a desktop desk. - In the demo, Jake uses three Intel NUCs to create a Satellite “location,” showing how distributed cloud can be deployed on small, edge‑style hardware. - He walks through the process of creating the location in the IBM Cloud console, attaching hosts by downloading and applying a post‑provisioning script, and bootstrapping the NUCs with a custom image via USB to achieve a highly available setup. - Finally, he designates one of the NUCs as the Satellite Control Plane, establishing a secure management layer for running IBM Cloud services within the new Satellite location. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WNjwlN5gMk&t=0s) **Untitled Section** - - [00:03:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WNjwlN5gMk&t=213s) **Managing OpenShift Clusters in IBM Cloud** - The speaker demonstrates navigating IBM Cloud’s OpenShift console, reviewing cluster locations (including a local instance), and using standard service options such as version upgrades, worker‑node maintenance, single sign‑on, and built‑in logging, monitoring, registry, and development tools. ## Full Transcript
0:00Hi I'm Jake Kitchener, I'm a Senior Technical  Staff Member here at IBM Cloud and the Lead 0:04Architect for IBM Cloud Satellite, an exciting  product that we have available for you now in 0:08IBM Cloud. What is IBM Cloud Satellite? IBM Cloud  Satellite is a platform service that allows us to 0:14expand the reaches of IBM Cloud to infrastructure  outside of IBM Cloud data centers. A powerful 0:21technology if you want to be able to consume  cloud services, but you need to be able to use it 0:26closer to your data, whether that may be in your  on-premises data center, on another cloud provider 0:32where you may have a data lake, or potentially  it's sitting on your desk like I have right here. 0:36Today I've got three Intel NUCs that I'm going  to be using to set up a Satellite location 0:42which I think is pretty cool. It's kind of like  any sort of store kiosk that you might need to 0:47set up and it's a great example of the power of  using distributed cloud with IBM Cloud Satellite. 0:52So to get started, the first thing I need to do is  log into the IBM Cloud console and navigate over 0:57to IBM Cloud Satellite. Once I'm there, I'm going  to go ahead and create a new location to represent 1:03my desk. I'm going to go ahead and click the  create location button, give this location a name, 1:09and click create. Pretty straightforward. Now,  once that location is up and running what I need 1:15to do is bring some of my infrastructure on board.  To do that I'm going to navigate over to the Hosts 1:22section which is the concept that we use in IBM  Cloud Satellite to represent the idea of systems 1:27that are outside of IBM Cloud as the host. The  first thing I need to do is click on Attach host. 1:33I'm going to go ahead and download this post  provisioning script and then once I've got that 1:37in my hand I can go apply that post provisioning  script to any system on the planet. That could be 1:41in another cloud provider, it could be in your  on-premises data center, or in this case I want 1:46to get it bootstrapped onto these Intel NUCs that  are sitting on my desk. Now to do that i've built 1:51a custom image that will automatically carve up  these systems into virtual machines and bootstrap 1:56them with my post provisioning script. So all  I need to do is get this onto that USB key, 2:02insert it into my Intel NUCs, and go ahead  and power them on. Now I'm going to go ahead 2:06and go through that process for all three  of these because I want a highly available 2:10setup. So I can do maintenance by removing  these later on, but that's pretty much it. 2:18Now that those systems are online. We can see  they're all up here and ready for me to use in 2:23my Satellite location and I'm going to go ahead  and get one from each of those systems assigned 2:28to be my Satellite Control Plane. This is really  the heart of IBM Cloud Satellite that allows us 2:32to build a secure way for us to go manage cloud  services into your IBM Cloud Satellite location. 2:40Now I've got these hosts assigned,  my location is in a normal state, 2:44and I'm ready to start using IBM Cloud Services.  Let's go ahead and take a look at what that 2:48experience is like. I'm going to navigate over to  the IBM Cloud Catalog and I could choose any of 2:54the IBM Cloud Satellite enabled services that we  have available. Today we're going to demonstrate 2:58Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, but it could be  other services as well like our Postgres database 3:03or potentially maybe some of our Cloud Pak for  Data as a Service options as well. So let's go 3:08ahead into the catalog to Red Hat OpenShift  on IBM Cloud and we can see I still have my 3:13traditional cloud service options where I can  provision into IBM Cloud data centers like a VCP, 3:18but I've also got the Satellite option available  to me as well. So I'm going to go ahead and 3:22choose Satellite. Choose my new location I  created and go ahead and give that a name, 3:31and then create that OpenShift cluster. 3:37Now, I can navigate over to my OpenShift clusters  in IBM Cloud and we can see I've got a number of 3:44clusters in here, some of them are located in IBM  Cloud, some of them are in Satellite locations, 3:49but this one is on my desk. Let's go ahead and  see what that looks like. I’m going to click 3:54over to my cluster here and I can see I’ve got all  the normal service options that I would have for 3:59Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud, I can update the  version of this cluster to the latest version of 4:04Red Hat OpenShift, or I can go in and perform  maintenance on my worker nodes as well like 4:08providing updates to them. I’m going to click  over to my cluster here and I can see I’ve got 4:13all the normal service options that I would have  for Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud, I can update 4:16the version of this cluster to the latest version  of Red Hat OpenShift, or I can go in and perform 4:19maintenance on my worker nodes as well like  providing updates to them. I get the standard user 4:21experience with single sign-on from IBM Cloud into  Red Hat OpenShift and all the usual tools that I 4:27would find in in Red Hat OpenShift are available -  I’ve got all my logging tools my monitoring tools 4:32the registry, all of the development tools that  are available to users of Red Hat OpenShift. 4:39So, very powerful tool that we've got available to  us here that allows us to really expand the reach 4:44of IBM Cloud and the powerful Cloud services  that we provide - in this case on my desk, 4:50but remember, it could be on any infrastructure  in the world running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 4:55Thank you for watching. If you have questions, please drop us a line below. 4:58If you want to see more video like this in the future, please like and subscribe.