Deployment Concepts

What is an edge deployment

An edge deployment is a virtual configuration of a gateway that runs at a customer site. It manages data acquisition from local industrial equipment and streams the collected data to the Fleetera cloud.

Each deployment runs the Fleetera Edge Runtime — a single lightweight service with built-in protocol drivers — in Docker containers on a Linux server at the site. The runtime keeps itself synchronized with the configuration you author in the cloud, buffers data locally when connectivity drops, and updates itself automatically.

Architecture

A site can have one or multiple edge deployments. Each deployment is configured for a specific hardware architecture:

Deployment lifecycle

Pending → Deploying → Online ⇄ Offline
                    ↘ Error

What runs on the gateway

The gateway runs a small, fixed set of containers, all managed by a single Docker Compose file generated by the platform. Container names are namespaced by the deployment alias, so multiple deployments can share one host.

Fleetera Edge Runtime (fleetera-runtime-<alias>)

The core of the gateway — one service that handles:

• Protocol drivers — built-in OPC UA, Modbus, MQTT, and REST drivers read data directly from your equipment. No separate driver containers are needed.
• Configuration sync — the runtime polls the cloud for configuration changes every 30 seconds and applies them to its in-process drivers (see below).
• Store-and-forward buffering — telemetry is written to an on-disk buffer before being exported to the cloud. If connectivity drops, data accumulates locally and is forwarded when the connection returns.
• Heartbeats — every 60 seconds the runtime reports its health to the cloud: VPN address, runtime version, per-driver status, buffer utilization, and host metrics.
• Command execution — value writes from Fleet Control over OPC UA and Modbus, and OPC UA method calls without input arguments, are executed through the same protocol drivers.

Edge Crawler (fleetera-edge-crawler-<alias>)

A companion container that performs OPC UA address space discovery on the local network. It is part of the standard stack; it can be disabled on deployments that do not need discovery.

Watchtower (fleetera-watchtower-<alias>)

The auto-updater. It checks for new versions of the Fleetera container images roughly every 5 minutes and rolls them out automatically, so gateways stay current without manual intervention. The runtime monitors Watchtower and reports its health in the heartbeat, and the platform surfaces auto-update health on the deployment page.

How configuration sync works

Configuration is authored in the cloud and pulled by the gateway — the cloud never needs to reach into your site:

1. You change connectors or bindings in the platform, and the configuration is published to the deployment's desired state.
2. The runtime polls the cloud every 30 seconds and detects the new configuration version.
3. The runtime applies the changes to its in-process drivers — adding, removing, or reconfiguring connections to your equipment.
4. The runtime reports the applied version back to the cloud, and the sync status becomes In Sync.

The last applied configuration is also cached on disk, so the gateway keeps acquiring data with its known-good configuration even if it restarts while the cloud is unreachable.

See Configuration Sync for details.

Key components

Bootstrap token

A one-time security token generated when you create a deployment. It is used by the installation script to authenticate the edge gateway with the cloud platform. The token expires after 24 hours and can only be used once.

VPN connectivity

Every edge deployment connects to the cloud platform through a WireGuard-based VPN mesh network. This provides:

• Encrypted connectivity between edge and cloud
• No need to open inbound firewall ports at the site
• Stable private VPN IP address for each gateway
• Works behind NAT and corporate firewalls

The VPN hostname is automatically set to the deployment alias.