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Edge Delivery

Horizon is the edge distribution and deployment product. It distributes Edge itself, plus applications and models, to large numbers of remote edge nodes: policy-driven rollout, bandwidth-aware delivery, OTA lifecycle, and autonomous reconciliation while offline.

The nodes it targets are field gateways running Edge, the southbound integration layer that connects field devices into Link.

The distribution loop

flowchart LR
    FORGE["NF\nmodels / apps"]
    HORIZON["NH\npolicy rollout · OTA"]
    EDGE["NE\nfield gateway"]
    DEV["devices · sensors · cameras"]
    LINK["NL\ningest · rules · alerts"]

    FORGE -->|versioned artifacts| HORIZON
    HORIZON -->|agreements · OTA lifecycle| EDGE
    EDGE -->|cmds / data| DEV
    DEV -->|telemetry| EDGE
    EDGE -->|mTLS · store-and-forward| LINK

Forge produces models and applications; Horizon delivers them (and Edge itself) to the field; Edge runs them on the gateway and bridges the field devices; and device telemetry flows back to Link — the same loop described in the architecture overview.

Policy-driven rollout

Horizon builds on Open Horizon: its console drives the Exchange and the agreement bots that deploy workloads to edge nodes. Rollout is expressed as policy and patterns, not per-device scripts:

  • Services are the deployable units, governed by policies, patterns, and management policies that decide where they run.
  • Nodes are the field targets; agreement bots form and maintain the agreements that keep the intended services running.
  • Rollouts are phased and canary-based — percentage or fixed-size batches that advance only after an observation pause, with circuit breakers that abort a rollout automatically on failure thresholds.

Service deployments are signed before they are published, and the matching public key is uploaded alongside the service — an integrity check on the distribution path.

Bandwidth-aware delivery

Field links are frequently intermittent and low-bandwidth, so delivery is designed to survive them:

  • Store-and-forward at the edge means a link outage does not lose data; the gateway buffers and forwards when the link returns.
  • Resumable downloads let a large artifact survive a partial transfer rather than restart; download progress is streamed to the UI but not stored as telemetry.
  • Autonomous reconciliation while offline: the edge keeps operating on its last known-good configuration and reconciles with the platform on reconnect.

The OTA lifecycle

Edge is delivered and kept up to date by Horizon over an OTA lifecycle. Two sources are supported: an external URL (the edge downloads it itself, with enforced integrity verification) or platform-hosted packages in object storage behind an authenticated path (so edges need no object-store credentials).

Updates move through staged phases — pending, downloading, verified, updating, rebooting, confirmed — with structured result codes for precise diagnosis. Process control includes pause, resume, and tiered cancellation: not-yet-started targets stop immediately while in-progress updates are not interrupted and their results are still collected.

NereidEdge on the field gateway

Edge runs on field gateways as an EdgeX Foundry application service. It provides:

  • Zero-touch onboarding — devices auto-connect on first telemetry, and the edge periodically reports a manifest of its attached device list.
  • Secure mTLS links to Link, with an outbound-only connection to the Link gateway.
  • Local autonomy — manifest reconciliation, heartbeat liveness grading, and connector desired-state reconciliation continue without the platform.
  • Handshake negotiation and feature gating — on connect the edge negotiates protocol version and feature set; non-overlapping versions or missing required features are rejected.
  • Configuration lifecycle — the platform pushes desired state and the edge reports actual state, with two levels of configuration (profile templates plus instance overrides) merged at dispatch.
  • Schema validation and drift reconciliation — edges advertise connector config schemas, and periodic list reconciliation identifies missing, stale, drifted, and extra instances.

The edge stays reachable on its own LAN

Edge connects to Link over the WAN with an outbound mTLS link; site-local commands and state (for example local device control) run over the low-latency local LAN and do not depend on the central link.

Operations documentation

Step-by-step installation and operations detail lives in each product repository: github.com/NereidAI.