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June 2022

LF Edge Releases Industry-Defining Edge Computing White Paper to Accelerate Edge/ IoT Deployments

By Akraino, Announcement, Baetyl, EdgeX Foundry, eKuiper, Fledge, Home Edge, LF Edge, Open Horizon, Project EVE, Secure Device Onboard, State of the Edge

Collaborative community white paper refines the definitions and nuances of open source edge computing across telecom, industrial, cloud, enterprise and consumer markets

 SAN FRANCISCO – June 24, 2022 –  LF Edge, an umbrella organization under the Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system, today announced continued ecosystem collaboration via a new collaborative white paper, “Sharpening the Edge II: Diving Deeper into the LF Edge Taxonomy & Projects.” 

A follow-up to the LF Edge community’s original, collaborative 2020 paper which provides an overview of the organization and details the LF Edge taxonomy, high level considerations for developing edge solutions and key use cases,the new publication dives deeper into key areas of edge manageability, security, connectivity and analytics, and highlights how each project addresses these areas. The paper demonstrates maturation of the edge ecosystem and how the rapidly growing LF Edge community has made great progress over the past two years towards building an open, modular framework for edge computing. As with the first publication, the paper addresses  a balance of interests spanning the cloud, telco, IT, OT, IoT, mobile, and consumer markets.  

“With the growing edge computing infrastructure market set to be worth up to $800B by 2028, our LF Edge project communities are evolving,” said Jason Shepherd, VP Ecosystem, ZEDEDA  and former LF Edge Governing Board Chair. “This paper outlines industry direction through an LF Edge community lens. With such a diverse set of knowledgeable stakeholders, the report is an accurate reflection of a unified approach to defining open edge computing.” 

“I’m eager to continue to champion and spearhead the great work of the LF Edge community as the new board chair,” said Tina Tsou, new Governing Board chair, LF Edge.  “The Taxonomy white paper that demonstrates the accelerated community momentum seen by open source edge communities is really exciting and speaks to the power of open source.” 

The white paper, which is now available for download,  was put together as the result of broad community collaboration, spanning insights and expertise from subject matter experts across LF Edge project communities: Akraino, EdgeX Foundry, EVE, Fledge, Open Horizon, State of the Edge, Alvarium, Baetyl, eKuiper, and FIDO Device Onboard. 

ONE Summit North America 2022

Join the broader open source ecosystem spanning Networking, Edge, Access, Cloud and Core at ONE Summit North America, November 15-16 in Seattle, Wash. ONE Summit is the one industry event focused on best practices, technical challenges, and business opportunities facing decision makers across integrated verticals such as 5G, Cloud, Telco, and Enterprise Networking, as well as Edge, Access, IoT, and Core. The Call for Proposals is now open through July 8, 2022. Sponsorship opportunities are also available. 

 

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.

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.

 

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Calling all Edge App Developers! Join the ETSI/LF Edge Hackathon

By Akraino, Blog, EdgeX Foundry, LF Edge

We’re partnering with ETSI ISG MEC to host a Hackathon to encourage open edge developers to build solutions that leverage ESTI MEC Services APIs and LF Edge (Akraino) blueprints. Vertical use cases could include Automotive, Mixed and Augmented Reality, Edge Computing and 5G, and more. Teams are highly encouraged to be creative and propose to develop solutions in additional application verticals. 

Here’s how it works:

  • Participants will be asked to develop an innovative Edge Application or Solution, utilizing ETSI MEC Service APIs and LF Edge Akraino Blueprints.
  • Solutions  may include any combination of client apps, edge apps or services, and cloud components.
  • The Edge Hackathon will run remotely from June to September with a short-list of best teams invited to complete with demonstrations and a
  • Hackathon “pitch-off” at the Edge Computing World Global event in Santa Clara, California Silicon Valley on October 10th-12th

Submissions are due 29th June 2022.  More details, including how to register, are available here.

Additional background information:

Edge Computing provides developers with localized, low-latency resources that can be utilized to create new and innovative solutions, which are essential to many application vertical markets in the 5G era.

  • ETSI’s ISG MEC is standardizing an open environment that enables the integration of applications from infrastructure and edge service providers across MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) platforms and systems, which offers a set of open standardized Edge Service APIs to enable the development and deployment of edge applications at scale.
    • Teams will be provided with a dedicated instance of the ETSI MEC Sandbox for their work over the duration of the Hackathon. The MEC Sandbox is an online environment where developers can access and interact with live ETSI MEC Service APIs in an emulated edge network set in Monaco, which includes 4G, 5G, & WiFi networks configurations, single & dual MEC platform deployments, etc.
  • LF Edge’s Akraino project offers a set of open infrastructure and application Blueprints for Edge, spanning a broad variety of application vertical use-cases. Each blueprint offers a high-quality full-stack solution that is tested and validated by the community.

However, teams are not required to use a specific edge hosting platform or MEC lifecycle management APIs. Developers may use any virtualization environment of their choosing. 

Submissions are due 29th June 2022.  More details, including how to register, are available here.

What’s Next for EdgeX: Onto Levski

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

By Jim White, EdgeX Foundry TSC chair

May was a busy month at EdgeX Foundry.  EdgeX released version 2.2, Kamakura in the middle of May (details here) and went straight into planning our fall release – code named Levski.  We also selected our 2022 EdgeX Award winners as well, and I’ll be posting a follow-up  to congratulate them and speak to some of their efforts.

Levski

First, what is the next release of EdgeX going to be about?  It is slated to be released in November of 2022.  It will, in all likelihood be another minor dot release (version 2.3 to be precise) that is backward compatible with all EdgeX 2.x releases.  The Levski release will also not be an LTS release.  Jakarta remains the first and only LTS for EdgeX for now (more on that below).  By the way, in case you are wondering where the name Levski (or the name of any EdgeX release) comes from, a top contributor to our project is selected in each release cycle to name an upcoming release.  Levski is named after one of our CLI developers’ favorite home-country (she is from Bulgaria) mountain peak.

You will see the words “likely” and “anticipate” show up a lot in this post because a lot can happen in the span of six months when building open-source software.  These caveats are there to remind the reader that what is planned is not set in stone – so if you are an adopter/user of EdgeX, design accordingly.

Major Features

Two of the most important features that we are looking to land in the Levski release are:

  • North-to-south message bus communications
  • Control plane (aka system management) events

North-to-south messaging will set up the means for a 3rd party application or cloud system to use MQTT to communicate with EdgeX’s command service and trigger an actuation or data fetch command all the way through to the devices/sensors.  

Today, communications going from north to south in EdgeX are accomplished via REST.  Therefore, things are not really asynchronous and there isn’t the opportunity to set the quality of service (QoS) of the communications in these instances.  Levski will allow adopters of EdgeX to use messaging to trigger actions and communicate data needs.  This compliments what is already available in EdgeX which is the ability to use messaging from south to north.  The design for this feature was finalized in this past Kamakura release cycle.  You can see the design document for more details.

The second major feature to highlight in Levski is control plane events (CPE) or also known as system management events.  This feature will allow EdgeX to send important events to would-be listeners (could be other EdgeX services, could be 3rd party subscribers) that something (an event) has happened in EdgeX.  Examples of control plane events are that a new device/sensor was provisioned or a new profile was uploaded.  Control plane events could also report on micro service issues – such as not having access to a database it needs.  Each EdgeX micro service will define its own control plane events, however in this release, it is anticipated that control plane events will first be tried with core metadata.

Other Features and Fixes

More Metrics

During the Kamakura release cycle, we implemented a new beta metrics/telemetry feature.  This feature allows any service to report (via message bus) on telemetry from the service that allows for better monitoring and management of EdgeX.  Telemetry such as how many events have been persisted, or how long does it take for a message to be processed in an app service can now be collected and published by EdgeX Metrics.  In this release cycle, we plan to proliferate metrics across all services (it was only in a few services for Kamakura) and take the feature out of beta status.

Experiment with MQTT authentication in service-to-service communications

Today, EdgeX has an API gateway to protect the REST APIs.  We also secure external message bus communications, but there is nothing that secures message bus communications internally.  In Levski, the community is going to be exploring possible solutions for securing MQTT message traffic.  We plan to explore and prototype with OpenZiti – a zero trust open-source project that provides an overlay network for secure communications between services and may even allow us to provide an alternative to our API gateway (Kong today).

Unit of Measures

In this past release cycle, we spent some time designing a solution that would allow units of measure to be associated to all of the edge sensor data collected.  There are many “standard” units of measure in the world.  We did not pick one, but allowed the adopter to pick / use the units of measure they want associated to their data.  In the Levski release, we hope to implement the design we formalized in the last release.  See our design documentation for more details.

Miscellaneous

The community is seeing more efforts by users/adopters to deploy EdgeX in non-containerized environments and wanting to build EdgeX for other environments (ARM32, RISC-V, etc.).  There is also a growing desire on the part of adopters to be able to have versions of our micro services that don’t include dependencies or modules that aren’t being used (for example, not including 0MQ when not using 0MQ for communications or not including security modules in a deployment that is not using EdgeX security features).  Therefore, the project is looking to provide more “build” from scratch options that remove unnecessary libraries, modules, etc. in environments where these features are not needed.  We call them “lite builds” and they should be more prevalent in Levski.

A growing demand for NATs as a message bus implementation in EdgeX will have the community doing some research and experimentation with NATS in this release cycle.  It is unlikely that full-fledged NATS message bus support comes out of this release, but we should begin to understand if NATs can be used as a message but implementation for our messaging abstraction and know the benefits of NATs over Redis Pub/Sub or MQTT for our use cases.

As you hopefully can see, Levski, while considered a minor release, will likely include a number of useful new features.

EdgeX 3.0

As part of the planning cycle, the EdgeX community leadership also considered the question of the next major release (EdgeX 3.0) and next LTS release.  By project definition, major releases are reserved for significant new features and inclusion of non-backward compatible changes.  We have tentatively slated the spring of 2023 as the target time for EdgeX 3.0.  We have been collecting a number of fixes and features that will require non-backward compatible changes.  We think the time will be right to work on these in the Minnesota release (code name for the spring 2023 release).  If all goes to plan, an LTS release will follow that in the fall of 2023.  The Napa release (code name for the fall 2023 release) would be the community’s second LTS release.  The 3rd major release and 2nd LTS release would fall exactly two years from our 2nd major release (Ireland in spring 2021) and first LTS (Jakarta in fall 2021).

Adopters should take some comfort in the fact that the project is healthy, stable and is looking out to the future.  As always, we welcome input and feedback on how EdgeX is supporting your edge/IOT solutions and what we can do better.