Running Tasks on Edges

A task runs on an edge only when it is pinned to an edge or targets edges by tags. Any other task runs on the Control Plane itself. See Selecting an edge.

To run a task on a specific edge, pin it to that edge when creating or editing the schedule. This allows you to choose where an operation runs based on the network location of the resources it protects.

See Scheduled Tasks for information about configuring scheduled operations.

Selecting an edge

The Control Plane decides where a task runs when the task is dispatched. A task can name one edge or a set of tags, but not both.

Tags let a task describe which edges it can run on rather than naming one specific edge. Each edge reports its tags to the Control Plane on every poll. A task targeting env:prod can run on any online edge tagged env:prod, so the Control Plane can choose among them instead of depending on a single edge.

• Pinned to an edge: the task runs on that edge. It fails if the edge is offline.
• Targeted by tags: the task runs on an online edge that reports every tag in the set. When several edges match, the Control Plane prefers the one that has run a task least recently. It fails if no online edge matches.
• Neither: the task runs on the Control Plane itself, even when edges are online.

A task pinned to an edge or targeted by tags never falls back to the Control Plane. If no suitable edge is available, the task fails rather than running somewhere it was not meant to run. For a task targeted by tags, the job output lists the requested tags. Check that an online edge reports every one of them, and that their spelling matches the tags the edge was started with.

A task is pinned to an edge with the Run on field when it is scheduled. Targeting by tags is not available in the Control Plane interface. It is currently only possible through the edge_tags option of the Ansible collection and the edgeTags field of the Kubernetes operator schedule resources.