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Maemalynn Meanor

The Linux Foundation Supports Asian Communities

By Blog, LF Edge, Linux Foundation News

The Linux Foundation and its communities are deeply concerned about the rise in attacks against Asian Americans and condemn this violence. It is devastating to hear over and over again of the attacks and vitriol against Asian communities, which have increased substantially during the pandemic.

We stand in support with all those that have experienced this hate, and to the families of those who have been killed as a result. Racism, intolerance and inequality have no place in the world, our country, the tech industry or in open source communities.

We firmly believe that we are all at our best when we work together, treat each other with respect and equality and without hate or vitriol.

This blog originally ran on the Linux Foundation website.

March 30, 2021

LF Edge’s State of the Edge 2021 Report Predicts Global Edge Computing Infrastructure Market to be Worth Up to $800 Billion by 2028

By Announcement, LF Edge, State of the Edge
  • COVID-19 highlighted that expertise in legacy data centers could be obsolete in the next few years as the pandemic forced the development of new tools enabled by edge computing for remote monitoring, provisioning, repair and management.
  • Open source hardware and software projects are driving innovation at the edge by accelerating the adoption and deployment of applications for cloud-native, containerized and distributed applications.
  • The LF Edge taxonomy, which offers terminology standardization with a balanced view of the edge landscape, is based on inherent technical and logistical tradeoffs spanning the edge to cloud continuum is gaining widespread industry adoption.
  • Seven out of 10 areas of edge computing experienced growth in 2020 with a number of new use cases that are driven by 5G.

SAN FRANCISCO – March 10, 2020 –  State of the Edge, a project under the LF Edge umbrella organization that established an open, interoperable framework for edge independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system, today announced the release of the 4th annual, State of the Edge 2021 Report. The market and ecosystem report for edge computing shares insight and predictions on how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the status quo, how new types of critical infrastructure have emerged to service the next-level requirements, and open source collaboration as the only way to efficiently scale Edge Infrastructure.

Tolaga Research, which led the market forecasting research for this report, predicts that between 2019 and 2028, cumulative capital expenditures of up to $800 billion USD will be spent on new and replacement IT server equipment and edge computing facilities. These expenditures will be relatively evenly split between equipment for the device and infrastructure edges.

“Our 2021 analysis shows demand for edge infrastructure accelerating in a post COVID-19 world,” said Matt Trifiro, co-chair of State of the Edge and CMO of edge infrastructure company Vapor IO. “We’ve been observing this trend unfold in real-time as companies re-prioritize their digital transformation efforts to account for a more distributed workforce and a heightened need for automation. The new digital norms created in response to the pandemic will be permanent. This will intensify the deployment of new technologies like wireless 5G and autonomous vehicles, but will also impact nearly every sector of the economy, from industrial manufacturing to healthcare.”

The pandemic is accelerating digital transformation and service adoption.

Government lockdowns, social distancing and fragile supply chains had both consumers and enterprises using digital solutions last year that will permanently change the use cases across the spectrum. Expertise in legacy data centers could be obsolete in the next few years as the pandemic has forced the development of tools for remote monitoring, provisioning, repair and management, which will reduce the cost of edge computing. Some of the areas experiencing growth in the Global Infrastructure Edge Power are automotive, smart grid and enterprise technology. As businesses began spending more on edge computing, specific use cases increased including:

  • Manufacturing increased from 3.9 to 6.2 percent, as companies bolster their supply chain and inventory management capabilities and capitalize on automation technologies and autonomous systems.
  • Healthcare, which increased from 6.8 to 8.6 percent, was buoyed by increased expectations for remote healthcare, digital data management and assisted living.
  • Smart cities increased from 5.0 to 6.1 percent in anticipation of increased expenditures in digital infrastructure in the areas such as surveillance, public safety, city services and autonomous systems.

“In our individual lock-down environments, each of us is an edge node of the Internet and all our computing is, mostly, edge computing,” said Wenjing Chu, senior director of Open Source and Research at Futurewei Technologies, Inc. and LF Edge Governing Board member. “The edge is the center of everything.”

Open Source is driving innovation at the edge by accelerating the adoption and deployment of edge applications.

Open Source has always been the foundation of innovation and this became more prevalent during the pandemic as individuals continued to turn to these communities for normalcy and collaboration. LF Edge, which hosts nine projects including State of the Edge, is an important driver of standards for the telecommunications, cloud and IoT edge. Each project collaborates individually and together to create an open infrastructure that creates an ecosystem of support. LF Edge’s projects (Akraino Edge Stack, Baetyl, EdgeX Foundry, Fledge, Home Edge, Open Horizon, Project EVE, and Secure Device Onboard) support emerging edge applications across areas such as non-traditional video and connected things that require lower latency, and  faster processing and mobility.

“State of the Edge is shaping the future of all facets of just edge computing and the ecosystem that surrounds it,” said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking, IoT and Edge. “The insights in the report reflect the entire LF Edge community and our mission to unify edge computing and support a more robust solution at the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco edge. We look forward to sharing the ongoing work State of the Edge that amplifies innovations across the entire landscape.”

Other report highlights and methodology

For the report, researchers modeled the growth of edge infrastructure from the bottom up, starting with the sector-by-sector use cases likely to drive demand. The forecast considers 43 use cases spanning 11 verticals in calculating the growth, including those represented by smart grids, telecom, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, automotive and mobile consumer services. The vendor-neutral report was edited by Charlie Ashton, Senior Director of Business Development at Napatech, with contributions from Phil Marshall, Chief Research officer at Tolaga Research; Phil Shih, Founder and Managing Director of Structure Research; Technology Journalists Mary Branscombe and Simon Bisson; and Fay Arjomandi, Founder and CEO of mimik. Other highlights from the State of the Edge 2021 Report include:

  • Off-the-shelf services and applications are emerging that accelerate and de-risk the rapid deployment of edge in these segments. The variety of emerging use cases is in turn driving a diversity in edge-focused processor platforms, which now include Arm-based solutions, SmartNICs with FPGA-based workload acceleration and GPUs.
  • Edge facilities will also create new types of interconnection. Similar to how data centers became meeting points for networks, the micro data centers at wireless towers and cable headends that will power edge computing often sit at the crossroads of terrestrial connectivity paths. These locations will become centers of gravity for local interconnection and edge exchange, creating new and newly efficient paths for data.
  • 5G, next-generation SD-WAN and SASE have been standardized. They are well suited to address the multitude of edge computing use cases that are being adopted and are contemplated for the future. As digital services proliferate and drive demand for edge computing, the diversity of network performance requirements will continue to increase.

“The State of the Edge report is an important industry and community resource. This year’s report features the analysis of diverse experts, mirroring the collaborative approach that we see thriving in the edge computing ecosystem,” said Jacob Smith, co-chair of State of the Edge and Vice President of Bare Metal at Equinix. “The 2020 findings underscore the tremendous acceleration of digital transformation efforts in response to the pandemic, and the critical interplay of hardware, software and networks for servicing use cases at the edge.”

Download the report here.

State of the Edge Co-Chairs Matt Trifiro and Jacob Smith, VP Bare Metal Strategy & Marketing of Equinix, will present highlights from the report in a keynote presentation at Open Networking & Edge Executive Forum, a virtual conference on March 10-12. Register here ($50 US) to watch the live presentation on March 12 at 7 am PT or access the video on-demand.

Trifiro and Smith will also host an LF Edge webinar to showcase the key findings on March 18 at 8 am PT. Register here.

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.

March 10, 2021

Linux Foundation, LF Networking, and LF Edge Announce Speaker Line-up for Open Networking & Edge Executive Forum, March 10-12

By Announcement, Event, LF Edge

Technology leaders, change makers and visionaries from across the global networking & edge communities will gather virtually for this unique, one-of-a-kind executive event focusing on deployment progress, 2021 priorities, challenges and more. 

SAN FRANCISCO, February 25, 2020 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, along with co-hosts LF Networking, the umbrella organization fostering collaboration and innovation across the entire open networking stack, and LF Edge, the umbrella organization building an open source framework for the edge, announced today the speaker line-up for Open Networking & Edge Executive Forum. The schedule can be viewed here and the speaker details can be viewed here.  

Open Networking & Edge Executive Forum (ONEEF) is a special edition of Open Networking & Edge Summit, the industry’s premier open networking & edge event, gathering senior technologists and executive leaders from enterprises, telecoms and cloud providers for timely discussions on the state of the industry, imminent priorities and insights into Service Provider, Cloud, Enterprise Networking, and Edge/IOT requirements. 

ONEEF will take place virtually, March 10-12. Times vary each day to best accommodate the global audience. Attendees will be able to interact with speakers and attendees directly via chat, schedule 1:1 meetings and more as they participate in this community call to action. 

“ONEEF is a great opportunity for the community to come together virtually after a very hard year,” said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT, The Linux Foundation. “We have an impressive line-up of speakers from across a diverse set of global organizations, ready to share their knowledge and passion about what’s next for our burgeoning industry. Hope you can join us!”

Confirmed Keynote Speakers Include:

  • Madeleine Noland, President, Advanced Television Systems Committee
  • Andre Fuetsch, Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, AT&T Services, Inc.
  • Steve Mullaney, Chief Executive Officer & President, Aviatrix
  • Jacob Smith, Vice President, Bare Metal Marketing & Strategy, Equinix
  • Dr. Junlan Feng, Chief Scientist & General Manager, China Mobile Research
  • Sun Quiong, SDN Research Center Director, China Telecom Research Institute
  • Dr. Jonathan Smith, Program Manager, Information Innovation Office (I2O), DARPA
  • Tom Arthur, Chief Executive Officer, Dianomic
  • Chris Bainter, Vice President, Global Business Development, FLIR Systems
  • George Nazi, Global Vice President, Telco, Media & Entertainment Industry Solutions Lead, Google Cloud
  • Amol Phadke, Managing Director: Global Telecom Industry Solutions, Google Cloud
  • Shawn Zandi, Head of Network Engineering, LinkedIn
  • Tareq Amin, Group Chief Technology Officer, Rakuten
  • Johan Krebbers, IT Chief Technology Officer & Vice President, TaCIT Architecture, Shell
  • Pablo Espinosa, Vice President, Network Engineering, Target
  • Manish Mangal, Chief Technology Officer, Network Services, Tech Mahindra
  • Matt Trifiro, Chief Marketing Officer, Vapor IO
  • Subha Tatavarti, Sr. Director Technology Commercialization, Walmart
  • Said Ouissal, Founder & CEO, ZEDEDA

Registration for the virtual event is open and is just US$50. Members of The Linux Foundation, LF Networking and LF Edge can attend for free – members can contact us to request a member discount code. The Linux Foundation provides diversity and need-based registration scholarships for this event to anyone that needs it; for information on eligibility and to apply, click here. Visit our website and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for all the latest event updates and announcements.

Members of the press who would like to request a media pass should contact Jill Lovato.

ONEEF sponsorship opportunities are available through Tuesday, March 2. All packages include a keynote speaking opportunity, prominent branding, event passes and more. View the sponsorship prospectus here or email us to learn more.  

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.

The Linux Foundation Events are where the world’s leading technologists meet, collaborate, learn and network in order to advance innovations that support the world’s largest shared technologies.

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.

February 25, 2021

LF Edge Member Spotlight: Red Hat

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 Lisa Caywood, Principal Community Architect at Red Hat, to discuss the their history in open source, participation in Akraino and the Kubernetes-Native Infrastructure (KNI) Blueprint Family, and the benefits of being a part of the LF Edge ecosystem.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver high-performing Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. We help you standardize across environments, develop cloud-native applications, and integrate, automate, secure, and manage complex environments with award-winning support, training, and consulting services.

Why is your organization adopting an open-source approach?

Open Source has always been at the core of Red Hat’s core values. As the largest open source company in the world, we believe using an open development model helps create more stable, secure, and innovative technologies.  We’ve spent more than two decades collaborating on community projects and protecting open source licenses so we can continue to develop software that pushes the boundaries of technological ability. For more about our open source commitment or background, visit https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source.

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 network edge is the focus of intensive reinvention and investment in the telco industry and beyond. With a wide array of use cases, and equally wide array of technology options for enabling them, supporting adoption of many new technologies and approaches requires having a common forum for working out design and operations guidelines as well as common approaches to interoperability. IoT requirements aren’t strongly featured at the moment, but we foresee opportunities to focus here in the future. In all of the above cases we strongly believe that the market is seeking open source solutions, and the LF Edge umbrella is a key to fostering many of these projects.

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

  • Forum for engaging productively with other members of the Edge ecosystem on interoperability concerns
  • Brings together work done in other Edge-related groups in an framework focused on implementation

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

We have primarily participated in the development of Akraino Blueprints such as the Kubernetes-Native Infrastructure (KNI) Blueprint Family. Specifcially, the KNI Provider Access Edge Blueprint, which leverages the best-practices and tools from the Kubernetes community to declaratively manage edge computing stacks at scale and with a consistent, uniform user experience from the infrastructure up to the services and from developer environments to production environments on bare metal or on public cloud, and the KNI Industrial Edge Blueprint. We are also active on the LF Edge Governing Board and other committees that help form and guide the project.

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

Close interaction with LF Networking and CNCF communities.

How will LF Edge help your business?

Red Hat’s partners and customers are strongly heading towards areas in RAN and other workload virtualization and containerization, 4g/5g, Edge, MEC and other variations on those areas. The Linux Foundation Edge’s umbrella is one of the premier places for organizations focusing on creating open source solutions in these areas to converge.

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

As with any open source engagement, prospective members should have clear, concrete and well-documented objectives they wish to achieve as a result of their engagement. These may include elaboration of specific technical capabilities, having a structured engagement strategy with certain key partners, or exploration of a new approach to emerging challenges. Take advantage of onboarding support provided by LF staff and senior contributors in your projects of interest.

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.

February 23, 2021

LF Edge Member Spotlight: Equinix Metal

By Blog, Member Spotlight, State of the Edge

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 Jacob Smith, Vice President of Bare Metal Marketing & Strategy for Equinix Metal, to discuss the their activities in open source, collaborating with industry leaders in edge computing, their leadership State of the Edge, and the impact of being a part of the LF Edge ecosystem.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

Equinix Metal is the leading provider of globally available, automated bare metal. Formed through the acquisition of Packet by Equinix in 2020, we focus on operating foundational, interconnected infrastructure that is proximate to the world’s major networks, clouds and enterprises.

Why is your organization adopting an open-source approach?

Our vision is to help make infrastructure a competitive advantage for today’s digital leaders. Open source is a key part of that strategy, providing a clear way for us to invest in “making the tent bigger.”  In our view, the more people and companies that innovate with digital infrastructure, the better.

In addition to our participation in LF Edge (especially the State of the Edge report), Equinix Metal is a leading member (and user) of the Open19 project. Last year, we also open sourced our core bare metal provisioning technology (Tinkerbell), which was accepted into the CNCF as a sandbox project. This continues our long support of the cloud native community, including a $1M annual infrastructure donation to support the Community Infrastructure Lab.

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 joined LF Edge at its founding due to our interest in edge computing use cases and our respect for the Linux Foundation’s ability to bring diverse stakeholders together. In addition to its leading projects, the LF Edge community invites and enables the kind of diversity in the edge ecosystem that is critical to its success.

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

One of the most important benefits is access to a growing group of companies that are serious about the edge. Interacting at the committee level allows us to connect with leaders throughout the field who are building truly interesting technologies and solutions to solve real problems.

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

The Equinix Metal team has focused its efforts on the State of the Edge project, which was co-founded with VaporIO and contributed to the LF Edge. This has been an exciting effort, downloaded by thousands of community members annually. I am also co-chair of the State of the Edge report.

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

Strong governance helps to ensure that a variety of voices and projects can gain influence, and this is a unique strength of the open-source community.

How will LF Edge help your business?

LF Edge provides a steady touchpoint in a fast-changing ecosystem. Now that we’re part of a large company and travel is restricted; it is easy to lose touch with the pulse of the industry.  LF Edge helps to keep us in touch.

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

Jump in and join a committee or raise your hand to help lead an effort. This is the best way — outside of contributing code — to drive our community forward while quickly forming the relationships that matter.

 

January 28, 2021

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!

 

December 30, 2020

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.

December 17, 2020

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 FRANCISCO – December 10, 2020 – EdgeX 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.

 

December 10, 2020

LF Edge Member Spotlight: OSIsoft

By Blog, Fledge, 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 Daniel Lazaro, Senior Technical Program Manager at OSIsoft, to discuss the importance of open source, collaborating with industry leaders in edge computing, their contributions to Fledge and the impact of being a part of the LF Edge ecosystem.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

Since 1980, OSIsoft has focused on a single goal: getting operations data into the hands of industrial professionals so that they have the information they need to reduce costs, increase productivity and transform business. Decades ago, before the modern internet, big data, or AI arrived on the scene, the company’s flagship PI System software became known for breaking ground as a historian: a database used by engineers in an operational environment that captures streaming, time-series data that reflects the state of the physical equipment (assets).

Over time, the PI System has expanded to meet modern industrial needs, allowing not only operations staff but also executives, software developers, data scientists and others to understand, share, and make decisions based on highly curated operations data. With its addition of edge and cloud-based capabilities, the PI System now makes this essential data accessible, usable and valuable to people, systems and communities of customers, suppliers and partners across and beyond the enterprise.

Why is your organization adopting an open source approach?

Open source enables collaboration and integration of heterogeneous technologies across organizational boundaries. Moreover, it provides a platform for innovation to create solutions designed to address technical and business challenges such as those at the edge. Our CEO and founder Pat Kennedy saw the opportunity for an open source approach to address such challenges at the edge and started Dianomic. We believe that open source is the fast track to innovation. Industrial systems are unique in the number of protocols, data mappings and overall diversity. Open source can uniquely address these edge computing challenges by collaborating on code that all participants can access, modify and expand upon.

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

Zededa introduced Dianomic to LF Edge before its inception. As a result, Dianomic and OSIsoft joined as founding members. The original idea was and remains to build a thriving open source industrial community. This is a challenge to the Linux Foundation in that industrial companies have not been traditional open source users. The operations (OT) side of the Industrial market tends not to be software/compute experts, they are machine, manufacturing and process experts.

LF Edge curates several open source projects and a community around them that addresses the challenges of edge computing in a wide range of vertical markets at the edge of the network. This framework provides a collaboration platform for organizations to build non-differentiating infrastructure for solutions at the edge driven by inherent tradeoffs between the benefits of centralization and decentralization.

LF Edge plays a critical role helping accelerate deployments of Industrial IoT enabling and expanding visibility of previously untapped aspects of operations.

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

In the LF Edge community, we see a group of like-minded organizations willing to work together. By collaborating through open source, we join forces to build the framework and ecosystem for the future of edge computing. Each project targets different pieces of the puzzle or building blocks to assemble in order to address the complexities encountered at the edge. Divide and conquer, focus, specialize and thrive. The community ecosystem provides learning and growing opportunities and a better together experience. At the same time, it enables exciting new revenue opportunities for new types of services and customers.

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

As a Premier member of LF Edge, OSIsoft actively influences the strategic and technical direction of LF Edge as voting members of the Governing Board and technical advisory council. OSIsoft brings its industrial perspective and expertise to LF Edge and contributes its vision working with different committees and through public speaking at various LF Edge related events. Our contributions play an important role in nurturing and growing a community of end users across various industry verticals within LF Edge. The end user vertical solution group kicked off October, 2020 with presentations by industrial companies showcasing valuable use cases implementing solutions using LF Edge projects.

We believe that the industrial edge has a different set of requirements that are better addressed with a specialized approach tailored to its specific needs, namely Fledge. The thriving and growing Fledge community of industrials has contributed back code to the project already deployed in production environments today. This adds to the previous contributions by service providers, system integrators, OEMs such as Dianomic, OSIsoft and Google to name a few. Fledge started when Dianomic contributed the entire FogLAMP stack in winter of 2019. At that time, the code was in its 8th release and had been commercially deployed in energy, manufacturing and mining operations.

Fledge works closely with other LF Edge projects such as EVE and Akraino. EVE provides system and orchestration services and a container runtime for Fledge applications and services. Together industrial operators can build, manage, secure and support both Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and non-SCADA connected machines, IIoT and sensors as they scale. Fledge is also integrated with Akraino, as both projects support the roll out 5G and private LTE networks.

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

Traditionally, alliances have focused on delivering recommendations, guidelines or standards Instead, LF Edge focuses on delivering reference implementations in the form of quality open source software ready for adopters to integrate in their solutions. The strong communities of end users and developers around the software that customize, integrate, implement and contribute back to the projects sets LF Edge apart.

How will LF Edge help your business?

The LF Edge framework lowers the barrier to adoption of edge computing solutions translating in increased industrial implementations that enable new use cases that were not technically possible or cost effective before. This allows OSIsoft customers to rapidly expand their real-time data infrastructure to new systems and devices in industry and operations for greater visibility into operations and business, faster decisions and higher value.

Moreover,  LF Edge enables the expansion to new market opportunities through technical solutions as well as its communities of end users and vertical solutions. LF Edge governance provides customers with confidence that the projects within the framework are developed with broad industry support and openness without vendor lock-in.

Finally, access to a large developer community and marketing efforts are opportunities to share resources and drive down costs.

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

Get familiar with the framework and ecosystem of projects. You can start by checking the website and read the various resources available, white papers and documentation provided by the community. Identify the projects, groups and communities that align with your organization’s goals. Join the relevant groups and communities, mailing lists and calls, listen in and learn and when you are ready participate and contribute. If you identify gaps or have solutions that can enrich the current ecosystem, bring them on. Contributions come in many shapes, not just code, and they are the means to drive direction and influence within LF Edge.

To find out more about LF Edge members or how to join, click here. To learn more about Fledge, click here. To see use cases for Fledge, check out these videos. Additionally, if you have questions or comments, visit the LF Edge Slack Channel and share your thoughts in the #fledge, #fledge-help or #fledge-tsc channels.

November 19, 2020

Open Networking & Edge Summit: Distributed but always Connected

By Blog, LF Edge

This year, hundreds of professionals spanning the telecom, IoT and edge industries came together at Open Networking and Edge Summit, which took place virtually September 28-30.

Hosted by the Linux Foundation, LF Edge and LF Networking, there were 1,778 registrations (1,322 for the live event and an additional 456 to date for post-event platform access to content and technical showcase). Those attendees that joined live hailed from 523 organizations in 71 countries around the globe with 54% from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. 

51% of attendees spent 10 or more hours on the virtual event platform, and over 68% of attendees spent 4 or more hours on the platform. 69% were first-time Open Networking & Edge Summit attendees. To learn more about the event, check out the 2020 post-event report here. 

If you missed it, you can find the entire Open Networking & Edge Summit playlist here, which includes keynote presentations, lightning talks, in-depth tutorials, panel discussions and project and use case sessions.  

Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking, IoT and Edge at the Linux Foundation, kicked off the event with a keynote that highlighted the five hard questions answered by LF Edge and LF Networking. 

  1. Why Open Source?
  2. Standards or Open Source?
  3. Why Contribute?
  4. POC to Production?
  5. Money?

Keynotes Day 1

LF Edge projects were featured in sessions:  

Your Path to Edge Computing with Akraino: https://youtu.be/_UCaQzachuM

Akraino TSC Co-Chairs Kandan Kathirvel (AT&T) and Tina Tsou (Arm) shared details about the Akraino R2 blueprints and R3 community goals, how to engage and contribute and demos of certain blueprints. 

How Akraino is Used (Panel Discussion): https://youtu.be/4kecTzrUdsI

Akraino TSC Co-Chair Tina Tsou (Arm), Sha Rahman (Facebook), Changming Bai (Alibaba), Mark Shan ( Tencent) and Yongsu Zhang and Hechun Zhang (Bytedance) shared end user stories and opinions on how Akraino is used in 5G, the AI Edge, Connected Vehicle, mixed reality AR/VR, and Private LTE/5G.

Serverless in Akraino: https://youtu.be/7Bosql0T5K8

Tapio Tallgreen (Nokia) decided to use the Akraino uMEC project in junction which is the biggest hackathon in Europe. Their concept was to use a scaled-down version of a smart city, with sensors and servers running in lightpoles. All servers were in the same k3s cluster and connected to the Internet. He wanted to make it possible for developers to create applications that can run on the cluster, and do it in 48 hours or less! This presentation details their journey to leveraging OpenFAAS Cloud as the user management and what we learned.

Self Checkout Theft Detection Showcase Using EdgeX Foundry: https://youtu.be/EQyQRFRsz0o

EdgeX Foundry Vertical Solutions Chair Henry Lau (HP) gave a presentation about how HP teamed up with other LF Edge members to demonstrate solving complex retail problems with an EdgeX Foundry powered HP Retail IoT Gateway. By making use of self-checkout theft detection use case, it showcased the ability to bring together multiple sensor data streams using EdgeX industry-leading open framework that is cloud-agnostic and sensor-agnostic.

Building the Android for the IoT Edge with Project EVE: https://youtu.be/0lchg7slk1k

ZEDEDA’s Roman Shaposhnik and LF Edge Governing Board member Jason Shepherd highlighted the key challenges of edge computing, the unique requirements of the IoT edge and why EVE is critical for IoT scale by serving as an open, standardized edge computing engine. We will host a brief demo and talk to what’s next, including integrating EVE with Kubernetes to extend the benefits from the data center to the IoT edge.

Living on the Edge to Meet Today’s Demands (Panel Discussion): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWWjZ4nEMfs&list=PLbzoR-pLrL6psbdaoF_E1pE-2dRhroc_T&index=72

In this panel, LF Edge Outreach Chair Balaji Ethirajulu (Ericsson),  EdgeX Foundry Chair of the Security Committee Malini Bhandaru (VMware), Roman Shaposhnik (ZEDEDA) and Akraino TSC Co-Chair Tina Tsou (Arm) discussed:

  • Edge use cases being addressed to satisfy the industry need
  • Collaboration between the LF Edge Projects and scope of each project
  • How to engage and contribute to each project

How LF Edge Powers the IoT Vertical Across the Stack (Panel Discussion): https://youtu.be/nZSNYDwK3Xc 

In this panel, LF Edge Board member Thomas Nadeau (Red Hat), EdgeX Foundry Chair of the Security Committee Malini Bhandaru (VMware), LF Edge Governing Board member Jason Shepherd (ZEDEDA), LF Edge Governing Board member Daniel Lazaro (OSISoft) and LF Edge Governing Board member Vikram Siwach (MobileedgeX) discussed contributions and cross-project synergies across Akraino, Baetyl, EdgeX Foundry, Fledge, Glossary, and HomeEdge. 

LF Edge/LF Networking Pavilion

As co-hosts, LF Edge and sister umbrella project LF Networking teamed up to present a pavilion at Open Networking and Edge Summit that showcased different technologies and use cases. Between 100-150 attendees visited the booths to download materials and watch demo videos. You can find the LF Edge demo videos on our Youtube Channel: 

Feedback from attendees was positive, with an overall average satisfaction rating of over 95%. 97% said they plan to attend a future Open Networking & Edge Summit, and 94% said they would recommend it to a friend or colleague. We’re in the process of planning next year’s event…stay tuned for more details!

November 5, 2020
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