Some 50 companies have joined a new open source project focused on IoT (Internet of Things) edge computing at the Linux Foundation. The effort could foster interoperability and faster maturing for enterprise and industrial IoT. Here are the key details from the Foundation's announcement:
IoT is delivering significant business value by improving efficiencies and increasing revenue through automation and analytics, but widespread fragmentation and the lack of a common IoT solution framework are hindering broad adoption and stalling market growth. ... EdgeX solves this by making it easy to quickly create IoT edge solutions that have the flexibility to adapt to changing business needs.
Designed to run on any hardware or operating system and with any combination of application environments, EdgeX can quickly and easily deliver interoperability between connected devices, applications, and services, across a wide range of use cases. Interoperability between community-developed software will be maintained through a certification program.
A key player in EdgeX is Dell. In October, Dell revealed Project FUSE, an IoT stack developed with dozens of partners that it intended to open-source. Those plans have apparently come to fruition through EdgeX Foundry. Dell is contributing the FUSE source code to the Linux Foundation project under the Apache 2.0 open source license, which is considered one of the most permissible of its kind:
The contribution consists of more than a dozen microservices and over 125,000 lines of code and was architected with feedback from hundreds of technology providers and end users to facilitate interoperability between existing connectivity standards and commercial value-add such as edge analytics, security, system management and services.
EdgeX Foundry members include AMD, ForgeRock, VMWare and dozens of other companies that play at different levels of the IoT hardware and software spectrum. The project is founded on the belief that edge computing—wherein sensors and devices send data to distributed gateways rather than a centralized data center, thereby speeding performance and mitigating network congestion—will drive the future of IoT.
IoT's potential depends on getting the right sources of data connected in the right way at the sensor and device level, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland. "As the numbers of devices and sensors have started to proliferate so has the realisation that there are new complexities to master at the edge of the IoT network," he adds. "The sheer variation of activities means this can't be a market where one or two products will emerge as the winners. Instead adopting standards and open source at the edge is to every enterprise and technology vendors's benefit. Its good to see the Linux Foundation stepping up to the challenge with EdgeX Foundry, and to see that significant support is already in place to make this move work."
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