Plakar Edge

By default, Plakar Control Plane (PCP) runs scheduled operations from the Control Plane appliance. This works well when the resources you want to protect are reachable from the appliance.

For environments where resources are spread across different networks, or where the Control Plane should not have direct access to them, you can run operations through an edge.

An edge is a lightweight executor that runs in the environment where the resources you want to protect are located. It connects to PCP, receives work from the Control Plane, performs the operation locally, and reports the result back.

This lets the Control Plane coordinate protection without needing direct connectivity to every source and destination.

When to use an edge

An edge is useful when the systems being protected are not directly reachable from the Control Plane, when it is more efficient to run the operation close to those systems, when the appliance on its own cannot keep up with the work, or when an integration needs tools that the appliance does not carry.

For example, you might deploy an edge inside a datacenter containing virtual machines and databases, while the Control Plane runs elsewhere. The edge can then access those resources locally without exposing them to the Control Plane network.

Edges are also how a deployment scales. Every operation an edge runs is work the appliance does not run itself, so adding edges increases how much protection a single deployment can carry out at once, without resizing the appliance.

Edges are particularly useful for:

• Protecting resources behind private networks, firewalls, or NAT gateways.
• Running operations close to the data to reduce unnecessary network traffic and latency.
• Distributing work across multiple executors so that protection scales beyond what one appliance can run.
• Keeping the Control Plane isolated from networks containing protected resources.
• Running the few integrations that depend on external tools, which can be installed on the edge host.

An edge belongs to the organization it enrolled into. That organization can run tasks on it, and so can the organizations below it that inherit its edge enrollment setting. See Sharing edges with child organizations.