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May 2023

LF Edge Member Spotlight: Edgenesis

By Blog, LF Edge, Member Spotlight

Author: Yongli Chen, founder & CEO at Edgenesis

About Edgenesis

Edgenesis is an open-source IoT interoperability and edge computing solution provider. 

Edgenesis is a technology company specializing in industrial edge solutions. We aim to drive standardization in device-driven IoT applications and offer flexible, efficient solutions to optimize production processes and reduce costs. Our team includes top talent from companies like Microsoft, McKinsey, Google, and Amazon, and we pride ourselves on our professionalism and efficiency. 

Using a Kubernetes-native development framework, we help clients deploy and manage devices and applications for various use cases. Our solutions provide critical data on devices and production processes, empowering clients to make data-driven decisions and stay competitive in the manufacturing industry. At Edgenesis, we are dedicated to innovation, constantly striving to improve our products and services to offer cutting-edge solutions. Our goal is to create a smarter, more connected world by leveraging our expertise in industrial edge solutions.

Why is your organization adopting an open source approach?

Mobile Internet was mostly about mobile phones connecting to the Internet to consume content. We’re now transitioning to the hyper-connected world era where digital intersects with every aspect of the physical world around us. Therefore digital solutions should mimic physical interactions. We believe in an ecosystem and the ability for solutions to interact across different vendors and providers. Now more than ever collaboration across the community is of importance. Therefore, we like to embrace an open-source model for any of our offerings.

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

We want to work with the LF Edge umbrella to facilitate the development of edge computing in a structured, collaborative way.

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

One of the many benefits we see in being part of the LF Edge project community is the opportunity to collaborate with like-minded professionals across the globe. 

What sort of contributions has your team made (or plans to make) to the community, ecosystem through LF Edge participation?

Shifu, an open source Kubernetes-native industrial edge which enables IoT interoperability. Shifu virtualizes IoT devices into Kubernetes pods, and gives you the all-in-one Kubernetes cluster which orchestrates IoT devices and applications at the same time.

What sets LF Edge apart from other industry alliances?

It’s the only organization that focuses solely on all aspects of edge computing across verticals. 

 

Fledge’s Journey: Celebrating its Graduation to Impact Stage in LF Edge

By Blog, Fledge

Fledge was first introduced in 2017 as an open source project by the Linux Foundation. The Fledge project, an open source framework for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications, was initially created by Dianomic with the goal of developing a lightweight and scalable platform for collecting and analyzing data from industrial devices. Dianomic contributed the Fledge codebase to the Linux Foundation with the goal of establishing an open and collaborative community around the project, as a solution to the challenges faced by IIoT applications, such as the need for real-time data processing and analysis, the need for secure and reliable data transport, and the need for a scalable and extensible platform among others. 

Three Maturity Stages for LF Edge Projects

Since its initial contribution, the Fledge community has continued to support, develop and grow Fledge as an open source project under LF Edge. The LF Edge technical steering committee (TAC) defines three maturity stages for projects:

  • Stage 1: At Large Projects: projects the TAC believes are, or have the potential to be, important to the edge ecosystem as a whole. They are typically early-stage efforts looking to add capabilities to the LF Edge open edge platform as a whole in exchange for community support. 
  • Stage 2: Growth Stage: projects that are interested in reaching the Impact Stage, and have identified a growth plan for doing so. The Growth Stage is meant to harbor projects still working on their product or service and are working towards supporting adopters at scale using the product or service. Expectations of the project Growth Stage projects have well-formed and documented processes, procedures and practices for planning, designing, implementing and documenting their intended edge product or service. Growth Stage projects have the resources (leadership, people, tools, infrastructure) necessary to deliver their product or service.
  • Stage 3: Impact Stage: projects on a self-sustaining cycle of development, maintenance, and long-term support. Impact Stage projects are widely used in production environments with a significant number of public use cases. Moreover they have broad, well-established communities with a number of diverse contributors. Expectations of the project include publicly known end-user production deployments, active participation in TAC proceedings, and as such have a binding vote on TAC matters such as the election of a TAC Chair, have publicly documented release cycles, ability to attract a number of committers on the basis of its production usefulness.

Fledge is the first and only project to graduate all the way to Impact Stage from At Large Stage under the LF Edge.

Today, Fledge is widely used in IIoT applications across a variety of industries and continues to evolve and grow with contributions from a thriving community of developers and adopters. The Fledge project and community focuses on industrial data pipelines to and from industrial assets and systems, edge applications and edge machine learning. Our community, users and contributors are suppliers and integrators to industrial markets as well as industrial companies including:  AVEVA, Schneider Electric, OSIsoft, RTE, JEA, Google, Neuman-Aluminum, FLIR and Dianomic.   The Fledge project has expanded into LF Energy’s Project FledgePower with 67 energy companies and suppliers and OSDU (an Open Group Project)  with 167 Oil and Gas companies and suppliers.   Fledge is deployed in both process and discrete manufacturing helping produce: drone military aircraft, engines, aluminum car parts, food processing, chemical polymers, energy, oil and gas, paper products, premium wines, professional auto racing digital twins and more.

While Fledge is open source and freely available for use, there are companies that offer commercial support and services for Fledge. For example, Dianomic, one of the original contributors to the project, provides commercial support, training, and consulting services for Fledge. 

FLIR Systems, Inc. a company that specializes in the development and production of thermal imaging cameras and systems has contributed to the development of Fledge by integrating its thermal imaging technology with the Fledge platform. The integration of FLIR’s technology with Fledge enables industrial customers to analyze thermal data in real-time, allowing for early detection of potential issues and proactive maintenance. The integration of FLIR’s technology with Fledge has resulted in the creation of several use cases for the platform, including monitoring the temperature of equipment in manufacturing plants, detecting anomalies in electrical systems, and monitoring the thermal performance of buildings and infrastructure. Overall, FLIR’s involvement in the development of Fledge highlights the potential of combining edge computing and industrial IoT technologies with advanced imaging and sensing capabilities to enable early detection of potential issues, increased operational efficiency, and improved safety.

AVEVA, a leading provider of industrial automation and software solutions, announced a strategic partnership to enable the integration of FogLAMP with AVEVA’s industrial software solutions. As part of this partnership, AVEVA became a reseller of FogLAMP software, providing its customers with access to the open-source platform for use in their industrial applications. The integration of FogLAMP with AVEVA’s industrial software solutions enables customers to collect, process, and analyze data from industrial assets in real-time, providing insights into performance and enabling predictive maintenance. The partnership also provides customers with access to a broad range of industrial automation and software solutions, combined with the flexibility and customization of the open-source Fledge platform. Overall, the partnership between AVEVA and Dianomic aims to provide customers with a comprehensive solution for their industrial automation and IIoT needs, leveraging the strengths of both companies in the industrial software market.

Fledge is Not a General Purpose Edge Platform  

Fledge was developed by and for industrial suppliers and companies to address the specific needs of industrial markets.   Developers adopting Fledge get all the time to market, licensing and community advantages of Linux Foundation projects.  They get a community with deep industrial, data processing and machine learning understanding.  And, most importantly, they get a final product or service that meets the exacting requirements of industrial users.

AccuKnox joins mimik Technologies, IBM as Open Horizon project partner

By Blog, Open Horizon

The Open Horizon project, contributed by IBM to the Linux Foundation, developed a solution to automate complex edge computing workload and analytics placement decisions. Open Horizon also provides end-to-end security for the deployment process using security best practices. As a result of its rigorous adherence to recommended procedures, the Open Horizon project recently earned the OpenSSF Best Practices badge.

While Open Horizon provides secure container deployment, it cannot guarantee that a container is free of flawed code or other vulnerabilities that could put the system at risk, nor that a container is inherently safe from someone else’s malicious workloads running on the same host. That’s where a dynamic runtime security solution like KubeArmor comes in.

KubeArmor is an open-source project at CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) foundation that secures containerized workloads.  But until recently it only did so within Kubernetes clusters. AccuKnox, in conjunction with KubeArmor and Open Horizon, added additional coverage to KubeArmor to ensure the security of deployed workloads on both Kubernetes clusters and bare Linux hosts running a container engine like Docker or podman.

KubeArmor provides deep visibility into the behavior of the deployed workload, including network, process, and file operations. This information is vital when making policy decisions related to workload security. In the context of Open Horizon, it was interesting to observe the runtime behavior of the anax agent and the containerized edge workloads that it deployed.

After thorough evaluation and approval by IBM developers, AccuKnox contributed the integration code to the Open Horizon project. The contribution was significant enough to qualify AccuKnox for membership in the Open Horizon project as a partner and voting member. The Technical Steering Committee then voted to invite AccuKnox to join based on the value of their work and the strength of their contribution.

To learn more about the Open Horizon project and how anax automates workload placement, consider attending the project’s Agent Working Group meetings.  The KubeArmor integration code is available in the GitHub repository.