KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China 2018

Goldwind (SEHK: 2208) is the 3rd largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world. We have deployed 28,500 wind turbines worldwide. Our wind turbines contribute to over 9040 megatons of CO2 reductions annually. Delivering renewable energy at this scale presents significant challenges to our IT operations team: Wind turbines need to be centrally monitored regardless of where they are installed in the world. On the other hand, weather data process and AI technologies must be deployed at the edge in order to predict power output for a cluster of turbines.

We will discuss how Goldwind uses Kubernetes and container technologies to solve these technical challenges. We will explain how Goldwind utilizes Kubernetes clusters both in central data centers and in edge locations. By deploying container technologies, we have achieved improved operational efficiency and 10x faster software iteration speed. We will also talk about some of the challenges we encountered in this on-going effort, in particular how to manage thousands of edge locations, each running independent Kubernetes clusters.