From Containers to VMs: Barbara 3.0 Powers a New Era of Edge Orchestration

Barbara 3.0: Modernizing Industrial Edge Infrastructure, On Your Terms

Barbara has long been a leader in the secure orchestration of containerized applications and AI models at the industrial edge.

In recent years, we've helped industrial organizations deploy advanced industrial data applications in environments where security, resilience, and performance can’t be compromised, from energy substations and water treatment plants to critical manufacturing facilities. Now, with the release of Barbara Platform 3.0.0, we’re entering a new chapter. 

Our orchestration capabilities have expanded beyond containers and native AI models to now include remote lifecycle management of virtual machines (VMs), a feature that may seem incremental on paper, but brings immediate huge value to OT infrastructure and digitalization teams.

This is not about ticking a feature box. It’s been a true effort from our product team to give our customers the ability to modernize on their own terms and at their own pace. To bridge decades-old infrastructure with intelligent automation, without compromising what’s already working well.

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With Barbara 3.0, industrial teams can now orchestrate containers, AI models, and virtual machines at the Edge, securely, remotely, and on their own terms.

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Rethinking Infrastructure at the Edge

With this release, our centralized management console, Barbara Panel, can now remotely deploy and manage three foundational building blocks in hundreds or thousands of distributed physical or virtual edge devices:

• Containers, for deploying modern, modular industrial applications with speed and flexibility across heterogeneous OT environments.
  
  
• AI models, which Barbara can deploy natively, without requiring containers or VMs — saving developer time, conserving edge resources, and reducing operational complexity.
  
  
• Virtual Machines, for applications that were never designed to run in containers and still depend on OS-specific runtimes (e.g., legacy versions of Windows or Linux).

Together, these three capabilities offer a unified, industrial-grade orchestration layer, helping organizations scale innovation across remote sites.

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A Market in Flux, and an Opportunity to Reset

The timing couldn’t be more relevant. The Virtual Machines landscape is shifting quickly,  and not always in ways that benefit end users. 

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Since Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, many organizations have faced steep price increases (some even reporting hikes of 500% to 1,000%), aggressive bundling, and less transparency around licensing and support.

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What may still work in centralized data centers is increasingly hard to justify at the industrial edge, where cost predictability, operational simplicity, and full control are essential.

Barbara isn’t trying to replace enterprise stacks like VMware in IT-heavy environments. But for companies deploying infrastructure in substations, factories, energy grids, oil fields, or utilities, Barbara offers a far better fit for OT-focused virtualization with:

• Transparent, predictable pricing: no hidden fees, no forced bundling, and no surprises at renewal time. Barbara’s licensing is designed for scalability and clarity, allowing teams to plan confidently and avoid vendor lock-in.
  
  
• IEC-62443 compliance: industrial-grade cybersecurity built in from day one. Barbara is designed to meet the most demanding security standard for critical infrastructure, helping teams reduce time-to-certification and stay compliant without extra effort.
  
  
• Remote, hardware-agnostic fleet management: manage thousands of devices securely and efficiently from a centralized panel. Whether cloud-connected, fully on-prem, or air-gapped, Barbara adapts to your infrastructure without locking you into a single hardware vendor.
  
  
• Integrated Industrial Marketplace: discover and deploy ready-to-use industrial data applications, protocol connectors, and AI models with just a few clicks. Accelerate use cases development and rollout, and standardize deployments across your fleet without building from scratch every time.

All of this is powered by Barbara’s integration with a broad hardware ecosystem of over 50 device models. But, for sectors that demand extreme levels of resilience, such as oil & gas or critical infrastructure, Barbara is now fully integrated with Stratus’ fault-tolerant hardware and hypervisor, enabling 100% high availability, zero-touch recovery, and continuous uptime in the harshest, most failure-sensitive environments.

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Barbara is the cost-predictable, secure, and flexible virtualization alternative purpose-built for the Industrial Edge, no lock-ins, no surprises, and 100% uptime where it matters most.

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Practical Value, Right Now

What does this mean in practice? It means that OT and application development teams can do more with less without compromising performance, compliance, or control.  Let me give two real-world scenarios we are already working in several customers and partners:

1. Legacy System Coexistence

‍Many industrial operations still rely on platforms like SCADAs, MES, ERPs, and HMI tools. Systems that weren’t built with containers or modern deployment models in mind. These often require specific OS versions, such as Windows, and tightly coupled dependencies. With Barbara, they can now be deployed in VMs at the edge, running seamlessly alongside advanced workloads like predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, or computer vision. All on the same Edge devices. 

2. Isolated Safety-Critical Workloads

‍Some edge workloads must be isolated due to compliance, either for safety, cybersecurity, or reliability reasons. With Barbara, critical systems like real-time control software, firewalls, or IDS/IPS can run inside secure virtual machines, while monitoring dashboards or analytics services run in containers. The result: a balanced environment where security and flexibility coexist on the same node without compromise.

At Barbara, we believe the Industrial Edge is where the future of digitalization will happen. Not every use case belongs in the cloud, especially when resilience, latency, data sovereignty, or high data volumes are in play. The cloud has its place, but it wasn’t designed for the realities of a remote substation, a factory floor, or an offshore rig.

So if your OT infrastructure and development teams are being asked to modernize faster, operate more efficiently, and keep everything running without skipping a beat. We’re building for that modern industrial world.  And we’re doing it where it matters most: the Edge.

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In just 1 hour and 30 minutes, you’ll discover how easily you can deploy and manage applications like Ignition, Canary, and the MING stack (MQTT, InfluxDB, NodeRED, Grafana) on Stratus’ ztC Edge, using Barbara's powerful Edge Orchestration tool. We  walk you through the creation of 3 virtual machines located in Dallas, all managed remotely from Spain via Barbara’s platform.

Watch it here

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