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December 2020

Over the Edge Podcast with LF Edge Members

By Blog, LF Edge, Member Spotlight, State of the Edge

Edge computing represents a long-term transformation of the Internet that could take decades to fully materialize. On the Over the Edge podcast, Ian Faison and LF Edge member Matt Trifiro interview corporate leaders, open-source experts, technologists, journalists, analysts, and innovators pushing the boundaries of edge. Since launch earlier this year, the podcast has featured several LF Edge members and contributors who are changing the landscape. As we look back at 2020, here’s a podcast roundup of what these leaders had to say about edge computing.

Edge computing is an inflection point – Matt Trifiro, CMO of Vapor IO and Chair of State of the Edge

Bringing the world of software into the world of physical networks – Jacob Smith, Co-Founder of Packet and Chair of State of the Edge

Bringing the edge to emerging markets – Joe Zhu, CEO of Zenlayer and Akraino contributor

How open source is expanding the horizon for IoT and edge – Malini Bhandaru, IoT Open Source Lead at VMware and Co-Chair of the EdgeX Foundry Security Working Group

Open source collaboration is the only way to scale – Jason Shepherd, VP of Ecosystem at ZEDEDA and LF Edge Governing Board member and one of the leaders of Project EVE

A 30,000-foot view of edge – Gavin Whitechurch, Co-Founder of Edge Computing World/COO of Topio Networks and State of the Edge contributor

How standards drive adoption and enable the intelligent edge – Alex Reznik, Distinguished Technologist at HPE and Chair of ETSI MEC and Akraino contributor

Building the easy button for edge – Cole Crawford, CEO and Founder of Vapor IO and one of the leaders of State of the Edge

The future of IoT deployment at the edge – Sarah Beaudoin, Head of Customer Advocacy at ZEDEDA and Project EVE contributor

The cloud that will power and scale the new internet – Mahdi Yahya, CEO and Founder of Ori Industries and Akraino contributor

Redefining networking to empower edge innovation– David Hart, CTO and Co-Founder of NetFoundry and EdgeX Foundry contributor

CBRS, Shared Spectrum, and the democratization of wireless access – Iyad Tarazi, President, CEO and Co-Founder of Federated Wireless and Akraino contributor

Additional podcast episodes can be found here. If you want to be featured in the Over the Edge podcast, let us know!

 

173K votes determined the EdgeX Foundry Challenge Shanghai Winners

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

Written by Kobe Lv, Senior Marketing Manager, Industry Division, IOTG Intel, and Jack Xu, Senior Marketing Manager, Emerging Technologies, IOTG Intel

On October 29, the EdgeX Foundry Challenge Shanghai 2020 successfully concluded. In under a year, we were able to rally the newly formed EdgeX China Project members to engage in a hybrid hackathon, bringing a significant portion of the developer community together to demonstrate solutions that solve a variety of commerce and manufacturing challenges. We admire the devotion and engagement of the developer community who contributed to the success of this endeavor, especially the 40 hackathon teams who participated during these challenging pandemic conditions.

We want to thank our EdgeX China Project collaborators IOTech, DELL Technologies, Canonical, Jiangxing Intelligence, Baowu Steel, BUPT and EdgeX Hackathon sponsors HP, Tencent, and Innospace for their support. What we achieved together is really remarkable.

Notable highlights from the EdgeX Foundry Challenge Shanghai 2020 inaugural hackathon include:

  • 40 team submissions
  • 15 demonstrations were selected based on their ability to address key pain points of the commercial and industrial verticals (e.g. Smart retail store, building management, predictive maintenance, defect detection)
  • FULL VALUE CHAIN ENGAGEMENT, including influential users such as CCFA (a top China retail association), Bailian Group, and Fast Retailing. Top utility and manufacturing brands such as State Grid and BaoWu Steel. Top investors, and those representing emerging technologies such as EdgeX Foundry, AI, Drone, Blockchain, 5G, and Satellite communication.
  • Community supporters like Canonical, DELL Technologies, HP, IOTech, Tencent, Thundersoft, VMware, and Innospace (a high-tech startup in PRC).
  • 173K votes were cast on WeChat with more than 50K+ blog views

The EdgeX Foundry Challenge Shanghai 2020 launched on July 3, and went through six main competition and review sessions:

  • Ideation and the program development challenge
  • Mentor and checkpoint sessions
  • Intel devkit distribution
  • Live streaming roadshow
  • Social media vote
  • Award ceremony

The team took a constructive approach to blend virtual and physical hackathon sessions. The quality of use cases and emerging technologies showcased was innovative and inspirational.

Results

We’d like to congratulate all of the teams who made the award list, and shared their expertise, ideas and technical acumen with the greater community. Here are the award winners:

To learn more about the award winners, click here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SUYLtgnmiqFAciqqCpaaP1Wn8uMvB0P4.

Think Big and Beyond

Today, edge computing has become a foundation of IOT architecture. We believe the timing is now, for both EdgeX Foundry and IOT developers to collaborate together to build IOT solutions for the most challenging industry problems, and more importantly, to deploy them in real scenarios digitalizing everything and changing the world.

On behalf of Intel and those collaborating on the EdgeX Foundry and the China Project, we look forward to supporting you on this journey. See you at the next challenge!

Other EdgeX Foundry Challenge Shanghai resources:

  • Click here to watch a video of how participants worked through the challenge
  • Click here to read a recap of the process
  • Click here to read the kick off blog that explains the rules and showcases sponsors

For more about the EdgeX Foundry China Project, visit the wiki at https://wiki.edgexfoundry.org/display/FA/China+Project.

LF Edge Member Spotlight: Equinix

By Blog, LF Edge, Member Spotlight

The LF Edge community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and people that represent the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source edge solutions. Today, we sit down with Justin Dustzadeh, Chief Technology Officer at Equinix, to discuss the importance of open source, collaborating with industry leaders in edge computing, their leadership of the Akraino Public Cloud Edge Interface (PCEI) Blueprint and the impact of being a part of the LF Edge ecosystem.

 

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

Equinix is a digital infrastructure company. We offer the world’s largest platform of high-quality data centers, including reliable interconnection to ecosystems of enterprises, clouds, networks and IT providers. With our global footprint of 220+ data centers in 26 countries, we currently serve nearly 10,000 customers, including the largest cloud providers, Fortune 500 enterprises and Global 2000 companies. Platform Equinix contains the highest share of public cloud on-ramps and most physically- and virtually-interconnected ecosystems.

Why is your organization adopting an open-source approach?

Consistent with our software-defined-everything vision, we believe in a software-first approach and the vital role of software in enabling the vision of digital transformation as a service. We believe in innovation through collaboration, and the power of the developer community and open-source ecosystems where participants can collaborate to develop software and improve it together.

We have significantly increased our engagements in the developer community and open-source ecosystems, including within the Linux Foundation where we have various technical and leadership roles and are actively engaged to help drive and contribute to a few key projects where we believe we can add value. Our participation within the Linux Foundation includes a Premier (top-level) membership with LF Edge, a Silver (standard-level) membership with LF Networking and a Gold (2nd-top-level) membership with Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Why did you join LF Edge and what sort of impact do you think LF Edge has on the edge, networking, and IoT industries?

The charter of LF Edge, focusing on establishing an open, interoperable framework for edge computing is well aligned with our vision of the edge. We believe that the edge will be richly-interconnected, with required capabilities for multi-domain, edge-to-multicloud orchestration, potentially spanning devices, access and aggregation networks, interconnected data centers and core clouds.

The diversity of edge use cases, such as IoT, distributed AI, private 5G, radio edge cloud (to name a few), and the corresponding technology and architecture requirements, reinforces the notion that edge will be everywhere and will evolve into an increasingly-complex ecosystem. We strongly believe that a community approach to help define a set of real-world edge use cases and capabilities integrated as blueprints, implemented with modern software stacks and cloud-native technologies, will accelerate the deployment of edge solutions with minimum friction, benefitting users and customers.

What do you see as the top benefits of being part of the LF Edge community?

We see a great synergy between the neutral role of Equinix, as the trusted global platform for reliable, highly-distributed and interconnected edge infrastructure, and the rich ecosystem of hardware, software, connectivity, content and cloud players required to enable various edge use cases. LF Edge is a forum where we can collaborate with many of these players in an open environment and co-develop edge solutions that can benefit from leveraging our infrastructure capabilities in service to the LF Edge community members and our customers.

What sort of contributions has your team made to the community, ecosystem through LF Edge participation?

Equinix has been actively engaged within the LF Edge Akraino community, serving as co-chair of the technical steering committee (TSC) and as project technical lead (PTL) for the Public Cloud Edge Interface (PCEI) Blueprint. Our contributions in the PCEI blueprint include: (i) the definition of the multi-domain architecture for interworking between mobile edge, public cloud core and edge, and 3rd-party edge applications/functions, as well as the underlying infrastructure such as data centers, compute hardware and networks, and (ii) the development of PCEI blueprint implementation for Akraino Release 4 demonstrating the use of edge multi-cloud orchestrator (EMCO, based on ONAP) for onboarding and deployment of cloud-native public cloud edge (PCE) applications from Azure IoT Edge and AWS IoT Greengrass Core on edge compute Kubernetes clusters to show end-to-end low-power wide-area (LPWA) IoT operation using 4G access and virtual evolved packet core (vEPC). We are contributing our lab infrastructure and interconnection resources and have been working closely with Microsoft, Aarna Networks, Intel, Arm, China Mobile and Verizon on integrating and demonstrating the initial PCEI blueprint.

What do you think sets LF Edge apart from other industry alliances?

LF Edge/Akraino is involved in a very diverse set of blueprints targeting enterprises, telcos and clouds while also interworking with other organizations and communities, such as ORAN, 3GPP, CNCF, LF Networking, TIP, ETSI and MEF. There are today over 30 active blueprint projects in Akraino. The breadth and depth of these use cases are unique in the industry, but the most important point is that these blueprints are not built in a vacuum – they align and make use of the upstream code and standards, showing running deployments where these architectures and interfaces are implemented.

How will LF Edge help your business?

We think that the LF Edge community will find it beneficial to make use of Equinix infrastructure and services that can help support edge deployments and applications. These capabilities include our data centers, interconnection fabric providing access to many networks, clouds and customers, bare metal hardware and orchestration and our virtualized network functions.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining LF Edge?

First and foremost, we believe it’s important to be aligned with the vision and charter of LF edge and have a good understanding of the various projects in order to effectively engage with the community and be prepared to contribute, e.g., by providing code or development resources, or integration/lab resources. One of the most remarkable aspects about LF Edge is the level of commitment, dedication and professionalism of the individuals who make up our community. The work being done on creating and demonstrating the blueprints is mainly on a volunteer basis, in addition to our primary jobs. We believe it’s this type of collaborative efforts (which take long hours, patience and trust) that will continue to drive technology innovation for edge computing for the years to come.

To find out more about LF Edge members or how to join, click here.

To learn more about Akraino, click here. Additionally, if you have questions or comments, visit the LF Edge Slack Channel and share your thoughts in the #akraino, #akraino-help, #akraino-tsc and #akraino-blueprints channels.

Predictions 2021: Open Edge & Networking

By Blog, LF Edge, Trend

Written by Arpit Joshipura is General Manager, Networking, Edge & IoT at the Linux Foundation

 

As we wrap up 2020, I wanted to take a moment to look at where the industry is headed and what we’ve learned this year. 

Telecom & Cloud ‘Plumbing’ based on 5G Open Source will drive accelerated investments from top markets (Government, Manufacturing, and Enterprises) 

This broad acceptance of open networking stacks shows the true power of what is possible when fat, fast, and functional features are at your fingertips. See information on ONAP’s Guilin release, EdgeX Foundry’s Hanoi release, and this recent post from FierceTelecom.

The Last piece of the “open” puzzle will fall in place: Radio Access Network (RAN)

The final closed architecture in the 148- year- old Telecom industry — the RAN — is finally open!  2021 will bring the first build-outs of open RAN technology in close collaboration with Edge and Core. Visit the O-RAN Software Community for more information. 

Remote Work” will continue to be the greatest positive distraction, especially within the open source community

LFN and LFE saw about 25-40% Growth in Developers and Contribution during 2020, and we expect the pace to pick up to almost 50% as more vertical industries embrace open source technologies. See Software Defined Vertical Industries: Transformation Through Open Source, a Linux Foundation white paper. 

“Futures” (aka bells and whistle features & future-looking capabilities) will give way to “functioning blueprints”  

Open source interoperability, compliance & verification for rapid deployment becomes the highest priority in 2021 beyond software. See the latest Blueprints from LF Edge’s Akraino project, as well as information on OPNFV + CNTT’s latest integrations.

AI/ML technologies become mainstream 

Closed loop control in an Intelligent Network paves the way for Intent-based Networking, and Predictive Maintenance emerges as a top use case in Edge using AI/ML.  What do you expect 2021 will bring to the open networking and edge table?

What did I miss? I would love to have your comments on LinkedIn.

EdgeX Foundry, the Leading IoT Open Source Framework, Simplifies Deployment with the Latest Hanoi Release, New Use Cases and Ecosystem Resources

By Announcement, EdgeX Foundry
  • EdgeX’s Hanoi release offers better data tagging, customized editing and a new Command Line Interface for improved performance and scalability
  • New use cases across AI, IIoT, Manufacturing and Retail as part of the Adopter Video Series
  • Resources to get developers started on the platform, contributor case studies and a library of commercial offerings as part of the new EdgeX Foundry Website 

SAN FRANCISCODecember 10, 2020EdgeX Foundry, a project under the LF Edge umbrella organization within the Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for IoT edge computing independent of connectivity protocol, hardware, operating system, applications or cloud, today announced the “Hanoi” release that makes IoT deployment easier and the launch of new ecosystem resources.

“EdgeX Foundry fosters an ecosystem of interoperable components from a variety of vendors to create a much-needed IoT framework for edge solutions,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Automation, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “With the support of LF Edge members and EdgeX contributors from across the globe, we are paving the way to enable and support a more robust solution at the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco edge.”

Launched in April 2017, and now part of the LF Edge umbrella, EdgeX Foundry is an open source, loosely-coupled microservices framework that provides the choice to plug and play from a growing ecosystem of available third-party offerings or to augment proprietary innovations. With a focus on the IoT Edge, EdgeX simplifies the process to design, develop and deploy solutions across industrial, enterprise, and consumer applications.

The Hanoi Release

EdgeX Foundry’s Hanoi release is the seventh consecutive semi-annual release and has a number of features including simplified deployment, improved performance and scalability testing and launch of Command Line Interface (CLI). Hanoi also incorporates the first collection of new, platform-wide micro service APIs that allows adopters to get a feel for what’s coming with EdgeX 2.0 in the spring.

Key features include:

  • Launch of the CLI: allows developers and users to issue a variety of EdgeX API calls to its services using terminal commands for easier scripting of tasks.
  • Improved edge data tagging: developers can tag the data coming from a variety of edges, so that everything is organized and configured by a preferred process that ensures the location of data can be found more quickly and efficiently.
  • Easier and simplified deployment: users will find that EdgeX now has a Compose file “make” capability that allows users to more easily customize their file without a lot of manual editing.
  • Improved performance and scalability testing: Adopters can now calculate what a large-scale deployment with EdgeX would look, and put it in their roadmap plans. Hanoi brings the ability to provide guidance around EdgeX scaling as the amount of data is pushed through the system, or how many devices of particular types you can hang on an instance of EdgeX.

EdgeX Foundry has a history of working closely with other LF Edge projects including Akraino, Home Edge, EVE and Open Horizon. With the Hanoi release, EdgeX has provided a sample service to export data from EdgeX to Fledge, an industrial IoT framework that focuses on critical operations, predictive maintenance, situational awareness and safety.  This allows EdgeX device connectors and capabilities to be used with Fledge instances. Conversely, with its next release, Fledge intends to provide a device service to allow Fledge instances to feed EdgeX instances.

To learn more about the Hanoi release, check out this blog post.

Moving Forward

The next step for EdgeX Foundry is the “Ireland” release, tentatively scheduled for spring 2021. Ireland will include a number of significant changes, including; EdgeX’s new V2 API set and V2 API testing;  additional security improvements;  and easier transition/communication between device services to message application services directly (allowing for better quality of service when needed and bypassing persistence when not needed).

New Ecosystem Resources

The new EdgeX Foundry website features a variety of resources that will help new developers get started, learn about new commercial offerings from LF Edge members and see the framework in action in real-world use cases across Artificial Intelligence (AI), Industrial IoT (IIoT), Manufacturing, and Retail. The recently launched Adopter Series showcases companies that already deploy the EdgeX framework in products and solutions including Accenture, HP, Intel, Jiangxing Intelligence, ThunderSoft and TIBCO.

Additionally, Canonical, an LF Edge member and long-time EdgeX Foundry contributor, has taken over the management of the EdgeX Snap Store. Since the Dehli release, the community has published EdgeX snap packages for desktop, cloud and IoT that are easy to install, secure, cross‐platform and dependency‐free.

“With this release, we are committing to the maintenance and publishing of the official EdgeX snaps in the Canonical Snap Store,” said Tony Espy, Canonical’s EdgeX  Engineering Manager. “Taking over management of the EdgeX snap is an important step toward providing developers with a safe and secure path forward for their customers.”

Additional resources:

For more information about LF Edge and its projects, visit https://www.lfedge.org/

 About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

 

The EdgeX Foundry Hanoi Release

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

By Jim White, EdgeX Foundry TSC Chairman

What a year 2020 has been!  If you are like me, you are looking for some stability and normalization right now.  For me, in addition to my family, I have come to rely on my work with the incredibly talented and dedicated people of the EdgeX Foundry community as an element of my centeredness and stability.

And just like stable clockwork, the community is delivering its seventh release of EdgeX Foundry.  We release EdgeX each spring and fall and this is the seventh consecutive semi-annual release since our founding in April of 2017.  That’s showing some pretty good consistency and it is all due to the efforts of some outstanding contributors.  This is the “Hanoi” release and it is a minor version release (1.3).  It follows and is backward compatible with our Geneva (v1.2) release that came out this spring.

Hanoi Features

Even though this is a minor release, there are all sorts of new features.  Too many to list them all, but here is a smattering of some of the more significant highlights:

Restructure of Compose Files:  For convenience, the project makes all the EdgeX micro services available in Docker Hub.  For further convenience, we have always supplied a set of Docker Compose files which makes deploying and orchestrating all the micro service containers to your target platform easier.  However, there have been so many EdgeX service options and configurations that EdgeX adopters typically had to do some customization of the Compose file(s) in order to suit their use case and needs.  With the Hanoi release, adopters will find that EdgeX now has a Compose file “make” capability that allows users to more easily customize their Compose file without a lot of manual editing.

Edge Data Tagging (location tagging): EdgeX already has the ability to get the collected sensor data to your choice of cloud, enterprise or other application in the format and structure that you want.  Now in Hanoi, you can tag the data coming from an EdgeX instance so that when it arrives in the cloud, enterprise, or in another application you know where it came from.  This is important when you have many EdgeX instances sending in edge data.  You can configure each EdgeX instance to tag the data as you see fit.  You could use the edge node’s address or system identifier, device identifier, a GPS location, node label or any means you desire to pin the incoming data in some meaningful way so that using systems and applications know where the data originated.

CLI tool: EdgeX formally launches its command line interface tool with this release.  The CLI allows developers and adopters to issue all sorts of EdgeX API calls to its services using terminal commands.  This allows for easier scripting of tasks that take care of duties such as provisioning a device, or setting up a schedule.

UI improvements: EdgeX, as edge middleware, operates in a headless way.  The UI was greatly revitalized and improved in this release.  It was not constructed for production, but you can use it for development and demonstration purposes.  The new UI allows you to see the status of the system, interact with its configuration facilities and even display some of the collected sensor data.

Fledge integration:  EdgeX is a member of the LF Edge umbrella project.  The purpose of LF Edge is to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud or operating system.  EdgeX has participated with a number of projects within the umbrella, but with this release, EdgeX has provided a sample service to export data from EdgeX to Fledge.  This allows EdgeX device connectors and capabilities to be used with Fledge instances.  Conversely, with their next release, the Fledge project intends to provide a device service to allow Fledge instances to feed EdgeX instances.

Distributed Device Services:  EdgeX, as a micro service platform, supports the idea of distributing the micro services across whatever compute and network you have available.  Having said that, actually distributing services of EdgeX to different hosts could be a challenge.  In the Hanoi release, we make it easier to distribute device services – that is the “thing” connector services – to other hosts.

Performance and scalability testing:  The EdgeX testing/QA team has been hard at work during this release to provide some initial performance and scalability testing apparatus.  With this capability, EdgeX has the ability to start to provide some guidance around how EdgeX scales as the amount of data gets pushed through the system or how many devices of particular types you can hang on an instance of EdgeX.  Our harness is still in its early stages with this release, but it allows adopters to begin to do some calculations about how a large-scale deployment with EdgeX would look.

Security Guidelines and Improvements: With each release, EdgeX has worked to improve our system security.  In this release, we have provided several guidelines for how to improve the EdgeX security posture.  For example, we offer a guideline on how to setup and use SSH tunneling (specifically for device service communications) or an overlay network for secure communications between services when needed.   In addition to guidelines, we have made several improvements to security services. One such example is a new hook in the security secret store setup service which provides for hardware-assisted protection of the secret store master key when available. In this release, we also completed several important security feature designs that, while not in Hanoi, will show up in Ireland and Jakarta releases in 2021.

Device Service Contributions:  during this release cycle, we have had several device service contributions.  Many of these device services are not quite ready for formal release, but they are available in our GitHub repositories for exploration.  We expect several of these device services to be approved and adopted by the community in the coming months (device services release separately from the rest of EdgeX services).  New device service connectors were donated for LLRP (for RFID), CoAP, GPIO, and UART.  An LLRP application service has also recently been donated.

Improvements Behind Scenes

Beyond the new Hanoi features and improvements, several other project improvements and ecosystem programs have been added with this release.  These changes aren’t directly reflected in our EdgeX micro service platform, but they help improve the software quality, improve our development processes, or make adoption and use of EdgeX easier and better.

New User Experience Program:  With Hanoi, the EdgeX community will shortly be announcing the availability of a new user program.  In this program, users will attest they can get an EdgeX instance up and running, and have some familiarity with device profiles and getting data through the platform.  The goal of the program is to provide awareness of users and their organizations that have EdgeX expertise while also promoting the sharing of EdgeX device connectivity elements (like Device Profiles) and sample data sets which can be used to accelerate adoption of the platform.

Canonical Management of Snaps:  Canonical has been a great partner and participant in the EdgeX community.  They have added immeasurably to the project in so many areas, and because of their open source experience, they have also provided the project with many lessons learned and guidance.  Since the Dehli release of EdgeX, the community has published EdgeX snap packages.  Snaps are app packages for desktop, cloud and IoT that are easy to install, secure, cross‐platform and dependency‐free. In providing Snaps, along with Docker images, EdgeX offers two examples of how EdgeX can be packaged and deployed.  With this release, Canonical has taken over the maintenance and publishing to the Snap Store of the official EdgeX snaps. Transferring the management and publishing to Canonical is a meaningful change in that it signals Canonical’s continued commitment to the project as well as signaling that EdgeX is important to the edge/IoT communities of the Ubuntu world.

Web site refresh: The EdgeX Web site has undergone an immense refresh during this release cycle under the direction of our marketing group.  The web site refresh helps to clarify the purpose and use cases of EdgeX, highlight the efforts of our community members, and will help adopters and users get familiar with EdgeX quicker and easier.

Introduction of the Adopter Series:  During this release, a spot light was placed on organizations using and adopting EdgeX in their products and projects.  In particular, throughout the summer, Accenture, ThunderSoft, Jiangxing Intelligence, Tibco and Intel all provided webinars on their use of EdgeX – highlighting why they chose EdgeX and what they hoped to see in future EdgeX releases.  Additional adopter series presentations are expected from HP and IOTech later this year.  This series has been instrumental in helping to drive more adoption, highlight real world EdgeX use cases, and provide critical feedback to the EdgeX community of developers.

DevOps Improvements: The EdgeX release is just the visible tip of a long arduous process of creating open source software.  Behind the scenes, teams of people labor to create and test the software.  And another team supports the developers that create and test the software.  The EdgeX developer operation’s (DevOps) CI/CD processes are some of the most well-constructed and engineer-time-saving systems on the planet.  The EdgeX DevOps team is the envy of the open source world and I dare say they would be the envy of most corporations.  Intel has substantially led the EdgeX DevOps team for a few years now.  In this release, they continued to add, improve and simplify the CI/CD process and tools.  These are not elements that end users get to see.  Inside the project, we appreciate how much more efficient it makes our developers and allows our project to add more features and fix more bugs.

Improvements in Software Development Processes and Tools:  EdgeX Foundry developers take their craft seriously and try to improve the EdgeX product by always looking at instituting the best/latest tools and processes.  During this release, a new process was instituted to vet 3rd party packages used by the micro services.  The intent is to reduce bloat in the services as well as eliminate the use of poorly maintained or utilized 3rd party packages.  In addition, a new tool was put in place to check any micro service’s use of a package (library or module) and notify the project (via automatic pull request) when a new version of the package is available.  In this way, EdgeX hopes to keep on top of outside improvements and the evolution of software we use internally.  Finally, we adopted the Conventional Commits Specification to help improve our git commit messages, which in turn we hope to use to improve our release notes and release information in the future.

Why Explore the Hanoi Release?

If you are already an adopter of EdgeX and you are using the Edinburgh, Fuji, or Geneva releases, migrating to Hanoi is straightforward as this release is backward compatible with any 1.x release.  You want to move up in order to get the bug fixes and improvements without seeing any functionality changes or losses.  Furthermore, the EdgeX community works hard to address issues, when possible, with the latest release.  If you encounter an issue with earlier releases, the community will ask you to upgrade before putting a lot of effort in trying to address an earlier release issue.

Another important reason to download and use the Hanoi release is to start to explore the version 2 (V2) APIs that have been provided as experimental / beta APIs as part of this release.  EdgeX is in the midst of a refactoring and improvement of our micro service APIs.  These new V2 APIs, when completed, remove a lot of early EdgeX technical debt and will provide a better informational exchange as well as allow for many new, future release features.  For one, the request and response object models in the new APIs are richer and better organized and these models will better support communications via alternate protocols (i.e. message bus versus REST/HTTP communications) in the future.

The construction of the entire V2 API will take us at least two releases.  So, they are not complete and not provided for production level use yet (some may change and therefore be non-backward compatible).   But with Hanoi, you can start to explore the new APIs and make plans for how the changes and improvements can be used in your solutions.  We also hope it will allow our adopters and community to provide feedback on where additional changes or improvements are necessary.

On To Ireland

What’s next for EdgeX?  Big things!  We are in the midst of planning our Ireland release.  It is tentatively scheduled for the spring of 2021.  It is likely that Ireland will be EdgeX 2.0 – a major release – and will include a number of significant changes.  First and foremost, it will likely contain our new V2 API set and V2 API testing (and allow us to deprecate the V1 APIs and older blackbox testing).  It will include a number of security improvements.  We are also looking at allowing device services to message application services directly (allowing for better quality of service when needed and bypassing persistence when not needed). 

Given this will likely be a 2.0 release (and by definition contain some non-backward compatible features), we will also take the opportunity to sunset and remove several legacy services and items in EdgeX – like use of Mongo for persistence and Drools for the rules engine.

Thanks Keith

This is my first release as the Chair of EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee.  I have been with the project since day one, but before me, Keith Steele was our TSC Chair and I served as his Vice.  Keith helped the project through 3 years of growth and 6 six successful releases.  He taught me a lot and put this project on sound footings.  And while he is not gone (he still serves on our TSC and is driving EdgeX outreach), the project is indebted to his service and leadership to the project.  He has left very big shoes to fill.  

But as I mentioned, this community drives me forward and is my stability.  My job is just to try to eliminate road blocks and stay out of their way.  It is a fun group of people to work with and collaborate.  Adoption of EdgeX is growing (we now enjoy over 7 million container downloads).  Our community is strong and friendly.  Plenty of room to come join us! 

What do LF Edge, Akraino, OPNFV, ONAP, Fishing and Fairy Tales Have in Common?

By Akraino, Blog

Written by Aaron Williams, LF Edge Developer Advocate

What do LF Edge, Akraino, OPNFV, ONAP, fishing and fairy tales have in common?  They all came up during our interview with the new Chair and Co-Chair of LF Edge’s project Akraino.

LF Edge’s Akraino project recently wrapped up our semi-annual face to face and welcomed newly elected Technical Steering Committee Chairs.

After two terms of serving as a co-chair, Tina Tsou, Enterprise Architect at Arm, was elected to be the Chair this year and Oleg Berzin, Technology Innovation Fellow under the Office of the CTO at Equinix, was elected Co-Chair by the Akraino TSC members.  We sat down with Tina and Oleg to learn more about them, what they are looking forward to next year, and how they see Akraino growing in 2021.

Tina Tsou

Oleg Berzin

How did you first get involved with Akraino?  

[Tina Tsou] My introduction to Akraino happened when I was working on an Edge use case for one of our customers at Arm. But I’m no stranger to the open source communities and working groups. Before Akraino, I directed the OPNFV (Open Platform for Network Function Virtualization) Auto project as PTL, integrating ONAP onto OPNFV (upon both x86 and Arm architecture and hardware) with a focus on edge cloud use cases. I was also the Chair of the Open Source SDN Breckenridge Working Group.

I am currently an active member of the Linux Foundation Networking (LFN) Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) and also lead the VPP/AArch64 activities in FD.io representing Arm.

[Oleg Berzin] Akraino aligned with my interest in the Edge and more specifically in the multi-domain nature of the Edge (spanning from devices to networks, to aggregation, to data centers, to clouds). I was involved in the ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform) project in the past (as an operator/user). With the diverse and complex nature of the edge deployments, we need a community supported set of capabilities integrated as blueprints so customers/user can deploy these solutions with minimum friction.

What was the first blueprint that you worked on?

[Tina Tsou] For Akraino, I worked closely on the Integrated Edge Cloud(IEC) blueprint family which is part of the Edge Stack of Akraino. The blueprint intends to develop a fully integrated edge infrastructure solution for Edge Computing. This open source software stack provides critical infrastructure to enable high performance, reduced latency, improved availability, lower operational overhead, provide scalability, address security needs, and improve fault management. The IEC project will address multiple edge use cases beyond the Telco Industry. IEC intends to develop solutions and support the needs of carriers, service providers, and the IoT networks.

[Oleg Berzin] The first blueprint I worked on was the Public Cloud Edge Interface (PCEI). The idea behind PCEI is to enable interworking between mobile operators, public clouds and edge infrastructure/application providers so that operators have a systematic way to enable their customers access to public and 3rd party edge compute resources and applications via open APIs that facilitate deployment of telco and edge compute functions, interconnection of these functions as well as intelligent orchestration of workloads so that the expected performance characteristics can be achieved.

What is a Blueprint that you find interesting (I know that you don’t have a “favorite”)?

[Tina Tsou] You’re right. It is hard to choose a favorite blueprint since all of them are interesting and serve purposeful needs for many use cases. But here are two that I find very interesting:

School/Education Video Security Monitoring Blueprint: This belongs to the AI Edge Blueprint family and focuses on establishing an open source MEC platform that combined with AI capacities at the Edge. In this blueprint, the latest technologies and frameworks like microservice framework, Kata container, 5G accelerating, and open API have been integrated to build an industry-leading edge cloud architecture that could provide comprehensive computing acceleration support at the edge. This blueprint is a life saver and hence my favorite since it improves the safety and engagement in places such as factories, industrial parks, catering services, and classrooms that rely on AI-assisted surveillance.

IIoT at the Smart Device Edge Blueprint family: This blueprint family use case is for those devices that live at the Smart Device Edge are characterized by having a small footprint yet being powerful enough to be able to compute tasks at the edge.  They tend to have a minimum of 256 MB for a single node and can grow to the size of a small cluster.  These resources could be a router, hub, server, or gateway that are accessible.  Since these device types vary heavily based on the form factor and use case served, they have a very fragmented security and device standards on how the OS and firmware is booted. This is where Arm backed initiatives like Project Cassini and PARSEC helps to enable the standardization of device booting and platform security. I’m excited for this blueprint to see successful deployments of Edge based compute.

[Oleg Berzin] One thing that surprised me when I joined Akraino was the diversity of use cases (IOT, AI, Private 5G, Radio Edge Cloud) that reinforce the notion that edge is everywhere and that it is very complex. I am honored to work with the Akraino community and contributing to the development of blueprints. At this point in time my goal is to make progress in the PCEI blueprint.

Is there a Blueprint that you are looking forward to seeing develop?

[Tina Tsou] I prefer the IEC Type 3: Android cloud native applications on Arm servers in edge for Integrated Edge Cloud (IEC) Blueprint Family. It evolves from Anbox based for single instance in R3, Robox based for multiple instances in R4, and my hope is to have a support for vGPU in the near future.

[Oleg Berzin] I think the Radio Edge Cloud is a very interesting blueprint. If developed, it has a potential of revolutionizing how the radio infrastructure is managed and adopted to diverse use cases.

What is the biggest misconception that people have about Akraino?

[Tina Tsou] As with many open source projects and technologies, the common perception that users have is that these projects serve a very narrow use case. I believe Akraino suffers from a similar misconception that it is a Telco-oriented project only. The reality is quite different. Akraino project blueprints can be applied in many facets of the industry verticals from Edge, Cloud, Enterprises, and IoT.

[Oleg Berzin] I am relatively new to Akraino, and my own misconception was that it only focused on small edge devices and IoT. As a Co-Chair and now having been exposed to the breadth and depth of use cases, I can now see that Akraino is involved in a very diverse set of blueprints targeting enterprise, telco and clouds while also interworking with other organizations and communities, such as ORAN, 3GPP, CNCF, LF Networking, TIP.

What are your and Akraino’s priorities for 2021?

[Tina Tsou &Oleg Berzin] There are multiple that we can list but we would point to these top 3 priorities for 2021.

  1. Akraino Blueprints for O-RAN specifications (e.g., REC integration with RIC)
  2. Akraino Blueprint to support Public Cloud Edge interface
  3. Akraino Edge APIs

What do you like to do in your free time?

[Tina Tsou] I live in the sunny-California bay area and I love fishing during weekends. Anyone who is interested to join me and have a chat about the Akraino project can contact me. 🙂

[Oleg Berzin] Apart from being involved in the technology and networking industry for many years, I enjoy learning new languages and finding common roots in different cultures. I sometimes find inspiration and time to translate children fairy tales from Russian into English – you can find the tales that I translated on Amazon.

Anything that you want people to know about Akraino?

[Tina Tsou] Ever since its launch in 2018, Akraino has found great community support for innovative creation of deployable Edge solutions with work going in more than 30+ Blueprints. These Akraino blueprints are now globally deployed to address several Edge Use Cases. It is a vast community with many active users and contributors and here are few things to know of:

  • Akraino hosts sophisticated communities and multiple user labs to speed the edge innovation.
  • Akraino delivered fully functional new Blueprints for deployment in R3 to address edge use cases such as 5G MEC, AI Edge, Cloud Gaming at Edge, Android in Cloud, Micro-MEC and Hardware acceleration at the edge.
  • Created framework for defining and standardizing APIs across stacks, via upstream/downstream collaboration and published a whitepaper.
  • Akraino introduced tools for automated Blueprint Validations, security tools for Blueprint Hardening and Edge API’s in collaboration with LF Edge projects
  • Akraino community has participated in several industry outreach events that featured participation to foster collaboration and engagement on edge projects across the entire ecosystem.

[Oleg Berzin] The most important fact I want people to know about Akraino is the dedication and professionalism of the individuals who make up our community. The work they do on creating and proving the blueprints is done on a volunteer basis in addition to their primary jobs. It takes long hours, patience, respect for others and true trust to work together and move the edge technology forward.

Demand for DevOps Talent

By Blog, Linux Foundation News, Trend

A few years ago, the demand for open source DevOps talent was relatively low. But this year, there has been a massive shift in the hiring pattern. Companies need developers with these skills who can not only maintain the performance of legacy workloads but also deliver agile and responsive operations for digital transformation.

According to The Linux Foundation’s 2020 Open Source Jobs Report, which examines demand for open source talent and trends amongst open source professionals, DevOps is currently in high demand and there are no signs of slowing down.

DevOps is the top role hiring managers are looking to fill (65% are looking to hire DevOps talent), moving demand for developers to second (59%) for the first time in this report’s history. 74% of employers are now offering to pay for employee certifications, up from 55% in 2018, 47% in 2017, and only 34% in 2016.

Additionally, companies have increased their recruitment of open source technology talent while offering educational opportunities for existing staff to fill skills gaps.

Companies and organizations continue to increase their recruitment of open source technology talent while offering increased educational opportunities for existing staff to fill skills gaps. 93% of hiring managers report difficulty finding open source talent, and 63% say their organizations have begun to support open source projects with code or other resources for the explicit reason of recruiting individuals with those software skills, a significant jump from the 48% who stated this in 2018.

Other key findings from the 2020 Open Source Jobs Report include:

  • Hiring is down, but not out, due to COVID-19: Despite the pandemic and economic slowdown, 37% of hiring managers say they will be hiring more skilled IT professionals in the next six months.
  • Online training gains popularity during the COVID-19 era: A full 80% of employers now report that they provide online training courses for employees to learn open-source software, up from 66% two years ago.
  • Certifications grow in importance: 52% of hiring managers are more likely to hire someone with a certification, up from 47% two years ago.
  • Cloud technology is hot: In terms of knowledge domains, hiring managers report knowledge of open cloud technologies has the most significant impact, with 70% being more likely to hire a pro with these skills, up from 66% in 2018.

 The full 2020 Open Source Jobs Report is available to download for free here.