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April 2018

Happy 1st Anniversary EdgeX Foundry!

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

The EdgeX Foundry community is back in Hannover this year, showing off the progress our members have made in developing a common interoperability framework and platform designed to make collaboration on Industrial IoT solutions that scale happen faster – and with less risk.

Our community is exceptionally proud of the members we’ve attracted, nearly 80 members in 17 countries including representation from the United Kingdom, South Korea, Serbia, Spain, Tunisia, Canada, Israel, Germany and Japan. We are equally proud of the composition of our collective – from small, agile start-ups, to some of the largest tech companies in the world.

In fact, our ecosystem continues to grow and today we welcome the addition of five new members, including Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP), ETRI, ISSAT Mateur, Samsung SDS and Volterra.

Award Winning

What’s great about the mix is the co-existence of so many diverse businesses, technologists, business development experts, and overall problem solvers that bring a unique perspective of leadership and innovation. In fact, this year, to mark our first anniversary, we launched the first annual EdgeX Foundry Community Awards to honor those individuals who have contributed in leadership and innovative solutions.

Community members nominated their peers and the EdgeX Foundry Governing Board selected two winners for the Contribution Award, which highlights leaders who have helped EdgeX Foundry advance momentum this year, and the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) selected two winners for the Innovation Award, which recognizes individuals who have contributed the most innovation solution.

We are excited to announce that Drasko Draskovic, CEO and Founder of Mainflux, and Tony Espy, Technical Architect for Devices and IoT for Canonical, Ltd, as winners of the Innovation Award for their extensive technical contributions. Andy Foster, Product Director for IOTech, and Drasko Draskovic are being recognized with the Contribution Award for their exemplary leadership that has made a significant impact on growing EdgeX as an open source project and interoperability platform.

Tony Espy from Canonical at Hannover Messe receiving the Innovation Award

 

Going Commercial

In addition to honoring these outstanding achievements from the EdgeX community, our first anniversary also introduces the fact that several project members, including Cavium, Cloud of Things, Dell, IOTech, Mocana, RSA and VMware, have already started to provide commercial solutions based on EdgeX, while others have embedded EdgeX technologies into their product and solution roadmaps.

More exciting news? The Government of Serbia Innovation Fund has awarded member Mainflux a grant to develop MFX-1, an IoT edge gateway powered by EdgeX platform. (For more information about the grant, click here.)

Hannover Messe

If you’re at Hannover Messe, the EdgeX Foundry booth, located in Hall 6: B17, will feature interactive demos from Canonical, Dell, IOTech, IoTium, RSA, Software AG and VMware. (Demo information can be found in this blog.) If you’re there, swing by to ask questions or congratulate Tony Espy and Andy Foster on their awards!

Follow us during Hannover Messe on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

EdgeX Foundry Celebrates 1st Anniversary at Hannover Messe with New Annual Community Awards Program and Continued Growth

By Announcement, EdgeX Foundry

EdgeX Foundry Logo

Open source IoT edge project continues to experience global momentum and widespread adoption

HANNOVER, Germany – April 23, 2018EdgeX Foundry, an open source project building a common interoperability framework to facilitate an ecosystem for Internet of Things (IoT) edge computing, marks its one-year anniversary with a substantial member presence at Hannover Messe and the launch of its first annual Community Awards program.

Introduced last April by The Linux Foundation and numerous members, EdgeX Foundry has grown into a highly respected platform that makes it easier to build, deploy, run and scale IIoT solutions given its native interoperability. Attracting small start-up companies to technology giants, the project has seen a 50 percent growth in the last year and has grown its global footprint to almost 80 member companies in 17 countries.

Some of these members and their technology will be on display at Hannover Messe in Germany from April 23-27. The EdgeX Foundry booth, Hall 6: B17, will feature interactive demos from Canonical, Dell, IOTech, IoTium, RSA, Software AG and VMware and exclusive keynotes in the booth theatre. A complete schedule of the keynotes and demo information can be found in this blog.

EdgeX Community Awards

To mark its momentum, EdgeX Foundry launched the first annual EdgeX Foundry Community Awards to honor those individuals who have contributed in leadership and innovative solutions. Community members nominated their peers, and the EdgeX Foundry Governing Board selected two winners for the Contribution Award, which highlights leaders who have helped EdgeX Foundry advance momentum this year through working groups, special projects, and/or contributed large amounts of code, bug fixes or documentation, while the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) selected two winners for the Innovation Award, which recognizes individuals who have contributed the most innovative solution. Winners will be announced at Hannover Messe.

“We are excited to recognize leaders in our community who have helped EdgeX Foundry become a trailblazer,” said Jason Shepherd, Chair of the EdgeX Foundry Governing Board and Dell Technologies IoT CTO. “Member companies both small and large are active in the EdgeX technical community in various ways and are leveraging EdgeX in their product and solutions roadmaps. In fact, we’ll see a few prototypes later this year.”

Building Momentum Ahead of California

In February 2018, EdgeX Foundry released the California Preview, giving developers early access to some elements of the California code release that support more efficient microservices and establish a path toward scalability. The California preview features several GoLang microservices that are drop-in replacements for the Java versions, including core services like Core Data, Metadata and Command.

The full California release will be available in Summer 2018 and represents a major step in evolving the EdgeX framework to support the developer requirements for deployment in business-critical IIoT applications.

“We are just at the beginning of this IoT journey,” said Keith Steele, EdgeX Foundry Chair of the Technical Steering Committee and CEO of IOTech. “EdgeX Foundry continues to hit milestones, and as we work towards the California release in June, the platform will be able to quickly and securely deliver interoperability between components, applications and services across a wide range of IoT use cases.”

Several project members, including Cavium, Cloud of Things, Dell, IOTech, Mocana, RSA and VMware, have already started to provide commercial solutions based on EdgeX, while others have embedded EdgeX technologies into their product and solution roadmaps. Additionally, the Government of Serbia Innovation Fund has awarded member Mainflux a grant to develop MFX-1, an IoT edge gateway powered by EdgeX platform. For more information about the grant, click here.

Ecosystem Expansion

EdgeX Foundry has made significant progress in its first year and has reached engagement on a global scale from countries such as the United Kingdom, South Korea, Serbia, Spain, Tunisia, Canada, Israel, Germany and Japan. More than 200 people from member companies join weekly and quarterly face-to-face meetings to align on project goals, develop working groups and identify project maintainers and committers across key functional areas. This month, EdgeX Foundry welcomes the addition of five new members, including Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP), ETRI, ISSAT Mateur, Samsung SDS and Volterra.

“CIP is committed to developing, testing and maintaining an industrial-grade software that lays the foundation needed for essential global civil infrastructure and economic systems for the next few decades,” said Urs Gleim, Head of the Central Smart Embedded Systems Group at Siemens and CIP Governing Board Chair. “EdgeX Foundry aligns with our industrial-grade edge software mission and will help us create a reliable and secure stack for smarter cities and stronger civil infrastructure systems of the future.”

“Since its foundation in 1976, ETRI has made a huge effort to grow the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry in Korea,” said Dongsoo LEE, VP of ETRI Honam Research Center. “EdgeX is a promising platform to support real-time data communication among a vast number of IIoT end devices with different communication standards. Time-Sensitive Networking is a key feature for innovative applications in Smart City and Smart Energy and we are delighted to collaborate on this project.”

“ISSAT Mateur is excited to join EdgeX Foundry and work on integrating a full open source platform to support the growing demand and the diverse traffic patterns coming from smart devices in diverse IoT systems,” said Dr. Akram Hakiri, Associate Professor and Senior Research Scientist  at ISSAT Mateur. “We at ISSAT Mateur believe that the EdgeX Framework will make it possible to bring the cloud computing micro-services, such as communication, computation, network control and storage, to the network edge at single hop users’ edge wireless devices to improve network reliability. This will offer significant progress in meeting the needs of diverse IoT scenarios such as urban mobility (connected cars in smart cities), multimedia content delivery, smart grids and Industry 4.0.”

“With the explosion of IoT connectivity across all industry sectors, we are seeing a demand for monitoring and operation of the edge as well as optimization and analytics through intelligent edge platform from our customers,” said Gyeongil Chae, the Vice President and Head of the Enterprise IoT Business Team for Samsung SDS. “Samsung SDS is excited to collaborate with EdgeX Foundry members, and look forward to working with them in developing standardized framework for IoT edge computing that ensures interoperability and vendor neutrality. In fact, we plan on enhancing the competitiveness of edge computing in industrial IoT by applying the EdgeX framework to our SDS IoT platform, Brightics IoT.”

“At Volterra, we believe the future of modern applications and autonomous systems require a highly scalable and distributed infrastructure focused on the simple and secure consumption of performance and data driven services,” said Marco Rodrigues, Vice President of Products at Volterra. “EdgeX Foundry’s charter aligns with Volterra’s mission that an open ecosystem is mandatory for driving innovation and interoperability for the edge computing industry to evolve. We’re excited to be taking part in the community’s evolution.”

For more information and to learn how to get involved, please visit the following EdgeX Foundry resources:

About EdgeX Foundry

EdgeX Foundry is an open source project hosted by The Linux Foundation building a common open framework for IoT edge computing and an ecosystem of interoperable components that unifies the marketplace and accelerates the deployment of IoT solutions. Designed to run on any hardware or operating system and with any combination of application environments, EdgeX enables developers to quickly create flexible IoT edge solutions that can easily adapt to changing business needs. To learn more, visit: www.edgexfoundry.org.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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Web Console for Multiple IoT Gateways

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

Guest post by Huaqiao Zhang, developer for VMware and contributor to EdgeX Foundry 

Preface

When users start using EdgeX, they could quickly run the service framework according to the official documents of EdgeX Foundry. EdgeX is a headless framework; often running in environments where there is no user interface capability or on systems that don’t have a display.  As a developer, this might be a bit inconvenient.  I decided to use an HTTP client tool and call EdgeX’s Restful APIs to become familiar with the features. However, you might desire something that is easier and more friendly to use.

This is what gave me the idea to create a Web Console where users only need to operate in the browser instead of manually typing in a lot of commands with parameters and assemble complex JSON data.  According to the EdgeX roadmap, the integration of EdgeX to various system management capabilities will soon allow those system management products, which often offer user interface consoles, to help users operate and manage EdgeX.  Importantly, these management systems will help manage multiple instances of EdgeX and the platforms it runs.  The Web Console that I created and contributed to the EdgeX, can serve as a tool for developers that want a better experience in interacting with the EdgeX microservices, or as a good starting point for those looking to create more extensive interfaces.

Why we need the Web Console

When a new user wants to add a new device to a gateway, if there isn’t a Web Console, he has to put some time and effort of learning the Restfull API of EdgeX Foundry and needs to confirm whether the relative data exist for DeviceService, DeviceProfile, DeviceAddress, etc. If not, he has to create it, then gets the ID or Name of that feature. Finally, he assembles complex JSON data and upload it. As another example, sending commands to a device could be even more complicated. All these could be hard for a new user or an on-site debugging engineer, but a Web Console would make it easier.

How to manage multiple gateway instances

When an enterprise uses EdgeX Foundry, multiple gateways can be deployed onsite. In most cases, each gateway has an internal IP address in the LAN rather than an Internet address. So, how to manage these gateways via a web console? There are two approaches:

  • A Web Console is deployed to each gateway. In this case, users need to remember the address of each gateway to operate and maintain multiple web consoles. Each gateway has to cost some resources to run its own web console.
  • Multiple gateways share one Web Console. In this case, there is a method to switch among all the gateways. All operation requests will be proxied to the selected gateway. With this approach, users only need to remember one address and maintain one Web Console.

Comparing the two options above, I prefer the later one. The limitation is that all gateways must be accessible to the host where Web Console is deployed. But in a company’s intranet, this should not be difficult.

Problems solved and basic implementation

The assumptions and expectations of multi gateway sharing Web Console are:

  • Gateways can be anywhere, but for an enterprise, they may all be in the intranet.
  • The host, which the Web Console is deployed on, can be one of the gateway or a PC that can access all gateways directly. So, the console should be very light weighted.
  • All operation requests should be dynamically proxied to the gateway selected by the user.
  • Multiple users could operate different gateways at the same time without affecting one another.

Based on these requirements, the fundamental architecture is shown below:

The basic user’s operation flow is shown as below:

  • After login, a user will be navigated to the management page of the default gateway. If there are no gateways at all or none selected, most menu items will not be permitted to operate.
  • When the user selects or creates one gateway, the metadata of gateway are stored into the local database in the web console.
  • Once one given gateway is activated, all operations will be proxied to the target gateway, then the data will be returned to Web Console.
  • Multi-user’s operations on different gateways will not affected one another.

Some necessary operations are illustrated below.

Gateway Management

 

Adding a Device

 

Device Service Management

 

Exporting Registration

 

Exporting Data Show

 

Check it out the video demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EOHR_gUeic.

Conclusion

This is just a prototype. I would like to gradually add some new features, such as a gateway location information using google map and video streaming. If you are interested in this web console for EdgeX Foundry, and want to join me on the effort, please ping me at https://twitter.com/Huaqiao_Zhang or the repos at GitHub: https://github.com/badboy-huaqiao/simple-local-gateway-console or https://github.com/badboy-huaqiao/edgex-foundry-web-console.

For more technical details, visit the EdgeX Foundry wiki page.

If you have questions or comments, visit the EdgeX Rocket.Chat and share your thoughts in the #community channel.

EdgeX Foundry on Display at Hannover Messe

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

From April 23 – 27, more than 220,000 attendees, speakers and exhibitors from 75 countries will be at Hannover Messe, one of IIoT’s leading trade shows in Hannover, Germany, to share best practices, display new technology and discuss what the future looks like for industrial systems.

EdgeX Foundry will be on-site at the tradeshow with a full agenda of activities in our booth, Hall 6: B17. Members from Canonical, IOTech, ioTium, Dell/RSA, SoftwareAG and VMware will be demonstrating leading-edge industrial IoT solutions based on EdgeX. Experts from these member companies will also share keynote presentations about edge computing, smart buildings, the challenges of interoperability, open source ecosystems and more.  Stay tuned here for the schedule.

Interactive demons at the EdgeX Foundry Booth, Hall 6: Stand B17 include:

Canonical: Canonical will be demoing a snapshot of the latest EdgeX development release called ‘California’ running as a fully-confined snap on Ubuntu Core 16.  This will be demonstrated on an Arrow/Qualcomm Dragonboard 410c.

IOTech: IOTech will demonstrate the power of edge computing and the benefits of its commercial offering Edge Xpert – the Open IIoT Platform for Edge Applications.  The ‘Edge Xpert’ will run on a 32-bit embedded ARM controller and integrate with a Modbus Smart Power Meter. It will showcase a live data visualization and edge-to-cloud integration between Edge Xpert and AWS IoT Platform.

ioTium:  ioTium will present their edge-cloud infrastructure solutions. They will be showcasing ioTium OT-Edge; bridges edge and cloud computing by moving applications to data; allows mission critical data to reside on-premise in industrial and manufacturing environments. With ioTium OT-Edge, applications are moved – not the data. With a single click from ioTium’s cloud-based industrial app store, applications can now be deployed at scale, across the edge.

Dell/RSA: Dell/RSA will present the power of EdgeX as a secure IIoT platform enhanced with hardware platform from Dell and innovative security software from RSA Labs. Their demo will showcase the use of security analytics for monitoring and threat detection for the IoT Edge, secure communication using OPC-UA (an industrial automation protocol) and protection of credentials at the edge.

SoftwareAG: Cumulocity’s IoT Edge platform supports a distributed architecture, with dashboards, analytics rules, apps and integrations developed for the cloud transferable to edge deployments and Edge Real-time streaming analytics.  Their demo is a small replica of a real use case where Cumulocity IoT Edge is being used to manage the operation of wind farms.

VMware: VMware will be showcasing how to take control of the Edge through VMware Pulse IoT Center and EdgeX technology with the aim to virtualize and isolate on the edge for enhanced security, manage heterogeneous edge gateways or systems, and integrate Industry protocols.

Want to see more from EdgeX Foundry?  You can visit other member company booths including:

If you cannot make it, you can keep up to date by following us on @EdgeXFoundry for highlights and pictures from the event and the EdgeX Foundry YouTube Channel for all the latest videos!

EdgeX Foundry Member Spotlight: Xage Security

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

The EdgeX Foundry community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that represent the IoT ecosystem. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source solutions. Today, we sat down with Roman Arutyunov, Co-Founder and VP of Products for Xage Security, Inc. to discuss Industry 4.0, challenges for edge computing, security and digital twins for machines.

What does your company do?

Xage is the first and only blockchain-protected security platform for industrial IoT, creating a tamper-proof “fabric” for communication, authentication, and trust that assures security at scale. Our platform supports any-to-any communication, secures user-based and machine-to-machine access to existing industrial systems, works at the edge even with irregular connectivity, and gets stronger and stronger with every device added to the network. Customers include leaders in the largest industries, spanning energy, utilities, transportation and manufacturing.

Why is your company investing in the IoT ecosystem?

Industry 4.0 promises to bring the next big wave of economic growth, optimizing production and customer experience. As a team of security, industrial digitization, and software experts, we knew security would be foundational to such an autonomous, any-to-any, edge-heavy ecosystem. The current centralized security systems simply aren’t designed to handle the scope, nature or complexity of Industry 4.0. We saw the opportunity to build a security fabric that is distributed, redundant, flexible, and adaptive enough to provide the necessary trust and integrity for secure Industry 4.0 interactions at scale.

How has IoT impacted your company? What benefits have you seen or what do you expect to achieve?

Our goal is to become the foundational and enabling security layer for IoT security across the major, evolving industries that need it––like manufacturing, transportation, utilities, and energy, among others. IoT has already had a large impact on industrial verticals ranging from robotics in manufacturing, connected cars in transportation, and integration of renewable energy sources like solar and wind in utilities. Data-driven autonomous operation with distributed intelligence is a common theme across multiple industrial verticals and has the promise of enabling significant improvement in service reliability, efficiency, and sustainability affecting our everyday lives.

Businesses currently have to invest a lot of time and energy into developing their own edge computing solutions. What are some of the business or technical challenges you have faced when adopting edge computing technologies?

When developing edge computing solutions businesses typically face the challenge of having to deal with multiple data and control protocols, building adapters for each, and creating a data store on top of which analytics solutions can be run. Additionally, as data is exchanged and accessed by multiple applications there is a need for effective access control. The Xage Security Fabric addresses the security concerns for data storage and access across multiple distributed systems and applications at the edge.

Why did your company join EdgeX Foundry?

EdgeX Foundry and Xage are aligned in our objectives to build a converged and secure solution, spanning multiple vendors, devices, and applications for industrial IoT at the edge. There’s massive potential to transform the way industrial organizations operate, and joining the EdgeX Foundry brings us one step closer to the reality of Industry 4.0, operating efficiently and securely at the edge.

How are you going to use the framework?

Xage has created a decentralized framework for securing IoT devices, applications, and and enabling any-to-any information exchange. The Xage Security Suite enables access control at the edge enabling zero-touch device enrollment, one-click user access control, and peer-to-peer application data exchange. Even before we became a member of EdgeX Foundry – we had been working with the framework. We plan to make our Security Suite accessible through EdgeX.

Where do you see enterprise and industrial IoT in 20 years?

Two decades is a very long time in technology’s terms – just think about what your cell phone looked like 20 years ago. Actually, most people used pagers back then! In 20 years, IoT will move well beyond connectivity and data, and will be a well-integrated part of our lives. Through the spread of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, we will invent “digital twins” for machines that currently power our industries, and learn to interact with them for joint machine and human decision making.

What is your favorite connected device?

I love cars, connected cars and autonomous cars. It has a been a passion of mine for some time now. One of the first connected and autonomous cars has been implemented in open-pit mining. Think large Caterpillar trucks the size of a 2-story house driving themselves.