Sunny Cai

According to STL Partners, the total edge computing addressable market will grow from $10 billion in 2020 to $543 billion in 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of 49% over the 10-year period. As edge computing becomes a significant revenue opportunity for the technology and telecom industries, it’s even more important to have effective leaders to advance the future of the edge computing industry.

Today we sat down with Joe Pearson, LF Edge Technical Advisory Council (TAC) chair and Edge Computing & Technology Strategist at IBM. Joe tells us how he got involved in the edge computing industry and why leaders must plan for the growth of IoT and edge.

How did you get involved in the LF Edge community and what is your role now?

Thank you for this interview. I work at IBM for Rob High, an IBM Fellow and CTO of Software Networking and Edge Computing. Rob clearly saw two key points many years ago: that edge computing was going to be one of the next areas of innovation and opportunity, and that the best way to ensure widespread adoption would be through foundational edge computing components being released as open-source. This coincided nicely with the Linux Foundation bringing together existing edge computing projects and culminating with the launch of LF Edge in January 2019. I was fortunate to be involved from the beginning and worked with early pioneers in this space through LF Edge’s Technical Advisory Council (TAC).

Fast forward to 2022 and after incubating and launching one project, and being TAC Sponsor for two others, I was voted into the position of Vice-Chair of the TAC.  After serving under the leadership of Jim St. Leger I was recently elected to succeed him as TAC Chair. I also concurrently serve as Chair of the Open Horizon project’s Technical Steering Committee (TSC) within LF Edge.

What is your vision for the edge computing industry? Tell us briefly how you see the edge market developing over the next few years.

Wow.  Please note that I don’t have a crystal ball, and any insight I may have comes from personal observations and the informed opinions of those I trust. I do not speak on behalf of my employer.

I’ll answer those questions in reverse order. Edge computing, especially within open-source, is on the cusp of maturing. That means that we will see re-grouping as some efforts fail to meet expectations. There will be some consolidation in this space. And leading solutions will begin to emerge over the next six to twelve months. Based on that outlook several outcomes will likely happen and it’s my intention that LF Edge and Linux Foundation-hosted projects are involved and at the forefront.  

First, we need to show how LF Edge projects working together can solve both current and future business needs in the following ways: 

• reducing solution implementation time-to-value by leveraging existing cloud-native tooling and standards, 
• aiding in application modernization efforts by serving as the foundational framework for cloud-agnostic edge deployments with easily-swappable components,
• discouraging vendor lock-in by creating and supporting industry and de-facto standards,
• supporting hardware heterogeneity by promoting and using edge-native development and pipeline creation best practices,
• demonstrating all of the above with freely-available source code using software licenses that respect contributor intellectual property in order to encourage both community participation and framework adoption.

Second, we need to lead the way in creating, documenting, using, and promoting standards and specifications that enable a healthy and open edge computing ecosystem. A shining example of this is how many LF Edge projects have embraced the FIDO Device Onboard Specification 1.1 for automated, zero-touch device and application deployments.

Third, we’d like to encourage all educational institutions, governments, enterprises, and other organizations to work with us to help shape the open edge computing framework to best meet their needs and requirements.  They can do this by working within individual project communities, by joining LF Edge as Premier, General, or Associate members, and/or by helping to create and run End User Solution Groups.

By working together towards those goals, we can prevent the proliferation of walled gardens and competing incompatible solutions that have prevented equitable cloud growth over the last decade and stifled greater potential innovation.

What impact do you see open source playing in the evolution of the edge market? And how has it shaped where we are today?

Without open-source, all we would have is vendors offering a series of proprietary ecosystems competing with each other to lock customers in. Further, there would be fewer incentives for collaboration between the larger players. Essentially, open-source prevents the edge computing market from being a zero-sum game and ensures portability between vendor solutions. It also levels the playing field between larger and smaller entrants while encouraging innovation at an increased rate. This is one of many reasons why you’ll see revolutionary advancements and experimentation happening in edge computing that just weren’t possible in cloud computing.

With open-source edge computing standards and specifications, we’re beginning to see OEMs and ODMs realizing the benefits of supporting an open approach while enabling competing solutions to emerge. This means fewer licensing fees, not as many unique SKUs needed, and working with communities and standards bodies. Now we still have a ways to go towards generating the critical mass of support that we need in the market, but we’re slowly getting there.

Why is LF Edge important to advance the future of edge computing?

LF Edge is certainly not the only organization involved in edge computing open-source software development. There are many other fine organizations, including our friends in both the Eclipse Foundation and the Apache Foundation. They each have slightly different approaches and governance structures, but our aims are compatible.  

What LF Edge brings that is different from the others is the scale, maturity, and track record of the Linux Foundation itself and the sheer number and variety of organizations already working together within the LF Edge organization and with its projects. This critical mass makes it simpler for both startups and established enterprises to invest time and effort in a single foundation for maximum reach and influence. And the expertise of other groups within the Linux Foundation are being leveraged to make significant strides that may not have otherwise been possible. For example, the OpenSSF best practices are not only helping LF Edge projects to address current security issues on the edge, but they’re also enabling innovation in critical new features like SBOM support.

But arguably more important than that is the promise that LF Edge does not play favorites when it comes to collaboration. Towards that end, the Eclipse Foundation has joined LF Edge as an Associate member and LF Edge projects are exploring opportunities to work together with Eclipse projects to create joint solutions in areas such as Industry 4.0 and Software Defined Vehicles.

What advice do you give to organizations who want to get involved in the LF Edge community?

Make sure that your organization has a clear idea of what vertical(s) you are targeting, who your customers are, and what you are trying to achieve. With those items clearly defined, it becomes much easier to determine which projects to work with initially, and what value you can bring to the community.  

Don’t expect the existing member companies to do the heavy lifting on your behalf.  Instead, think about how your involvement can benefit everyone. And be prepared to contribute resources to help efforts succeed, even if your organization may not see an immediate direct benefit. For example, Intel seeded the initial funding for mentorship stipends within LF Edge, and helped more than eight college students to each spend a semester studying directly with industry mentors and working on important features in LF Edge projects over the last few years.

And be prepared to work together with the other members knowing that each member individually may not always achieve the goals of their organization, but as long as we continue to advance the goals of LF Edge we’re still making forward progress.

About LF Edge:

LF Edge is an umbrella organization to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system. With the support of 29 Premier members, 28 General members and 14 associate members, LF Edge hosts 11 projects including Akraino, EdgeX Foundry, Project EVE and more.

Advance the future of edge computing with LF Edge and become a paying member.

According to Gartner, more than 50% of enterprise-managed data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud by 2025, with an increase of  over $500 billion in the edge computing market by 2030. As edge computing becomes a significant revenue opportunity for the technology and telecom industries, it’s even more important to have effective leaders to advance the future of the edge computing industry.

Today we sat down with Tina Tsou, LF Edge Governing Board Chair, and Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem at Arm. Tina tells us how she got involved in open source, the edge computing industry, and why leaders must plan for the growth of IoT and edge.

How did you get involved in the LF Edge community and what is your role now?

I have been involved in the Akraino project specifically since 2018 before the LF Edge umbrella organization was formed in 2019. My role was Akraino Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Co-Chair, and later Akraino TSC Chair, LF Edge Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) member, and then most recently, I was elected Chair of the LF Edge Governing Board. I help the LF Edge community from both a technical and governance standpoint. 

What is your vision for the edge computing industry? Tell us briefly how you see the edge market developing over the next few years.

From the perspective of edge cloud technology development, edge cloud technology must not only conform to the technical route of cloud computing development, but also meet edge innovation services and new requirements of the scene. This places high demands on the software and hardware of edge cloud technology. Overall, “converging” technology and “collaboration” technology will become the core of edge cloud technology development.

In terms of computing technology, computing power virtualization technology is gradually developing towards the edge cloud-native direction at the edge. It’s the development direction of converged computing technology.

In terms of network technology, hyper-converged network architecture is the main trend of edge networks.The trend of integration of network technologies is developing towards the direction of cloud-network integration.

In terms of storage technology, distributed “cache” technology will gradually become the mainstream of edge cloud storage technology. The group ensures the security, reliability, redundancy and backup requirements of data storage, and also meets the timeliness and periodic requirements of data read and write.

In terms of edge management and control technology, the unified management and control technology will continue to be upgraded, and at the same time, a perfect hierarchical management system will be established between the center and the edge. A control mechanism is used to realize the coordination and unification of edge clouds at the resource and business level.

In terms of edge hardware infrastructure technology, with the introduction of heterogeneous devices such as smart network cards, GPUs, and NPUs, edge hardware will support the integration of a large number of heterogeneous devices in the future. At the same time, in order to meet the customization requirements of edge scenarios, there will also be Lots of custom equipment.

As technology evolves, so does standard placement and work. With the gradual improvement of edge cloud industry standards, general requirements such as related term definitions and basic service capabilities in the field of edge cloud technology are also improved. At the same time, standards are gradually regulating the development of edge cloud technology and services. In the future, the industry will continue to promote the standardization process of edge cloud: edge cloud hardware, focusing on edge cloud hardware for scenario-based applications (cloud games, cloud applications, codecs, bare metal, etc.), edge cloud all-in-one machines, etc.; edge cloud platform services In terms of edge cloud management and control, the focus is on edge cloud management, automated operation and maintenance, global scheduling, etc. In terms of edge cloud applications, the focus is on the edge for industries and application scenarios. Cloud services (government, industry, audio and video, etc.), etc.

In the future, with the continuous evolution and development of edge cloud technology and standards, it will promote the practical application of edge cloud in more industries and scenarios, and expand cloud services. It can help the distributed and ubiquitous development of computing power, and accelerate the digital transformation process of various industries.

What impact do you see open source playing in the evolution of the edge market? And how has it shaped where we are today?

Open Source collaboration helps to drive standards, differentiation versus innovation with benefits. Open source helps to remove vendor lock-in and enable automation, speed of innovation and deployment. Successful open source development depends on the complete life cycle of projects, products that the market can adopt and deploy. 

Using open source best practices, LF Edge enables communities to leverage CI/CD infrastructure. 

Closed Innovation

• The smartest people work for us
• We must build it ourself
• We can get to market first
• Controlling R&D is our path to growth
• Controlling our IP helps limit competition

Open Innovation

• We work with smart people everywhere
• It takes an organized community to build it
• Building better matters more than being first
• We don’t have to originate all the research
• We profit from others and others profit from us

Why is LF Edge important to advance the future of edge computing?

In the Connected Vehicle Blueprint (CVB) project, we established a collaborative architecture between the central cloud and the roadside MEC computing unit through the following architecture:

The real-time video of the road is obtained through the camera on the roadside, and the image AI processing work is carried out in the roadside MEC to achieve the goal of the road.

Monitoring and tracking, scene recognition and traffic abnormal scene judgment in the central cloud, early warning through 5G and V2X message distribution.

During the Winter Olympics, based on some technical achievements of the vehicle-road collaboration in the CVB project, Tencent and China Unicom created a 5G vehicle-road coordination full-link travel service. Before traveling, you can use the car-hailing service to book an online car-hailing service that supports vehicle-road coordination.

During the travel process, the vehicle-road coordination service provides the user’s vehicle with a traffic warning service. After reaching the destination, the car provides automatic parking services based on vehicle-road coordination.

What is Arm’s role in edge computing and LF Edge?

Arm is a leading contributor in the LF Edge Catalog to reduce friction to deployment of LF Edge Templates, and provide a centralized location for all deployable Templates (Template = software + configuration). The catalog provides recipes for deploying templates. 

Arm leads System Security on the Edge aspects. During Akraino blueprint development, blueprint owners may put a lot of effort into analyzing security threats and implementing security features in their projects. However, in many cases, blueprint owners assume that the blueprint execution environment is well-protected and does not require their attention.

Such assumptions may lead to attacks using platform-level vulnerabilities that interfere with the blueprint functionality and cause the loss of private or critical data. For this reason, the requirements for platform-level security should be considered an important part of blueprint requirements.

The Akraino PSA, Platform Security Architecture, defines core security requirements for Akraino platforms and blueprint execution environments. Akraino PSA requirements are platform agnostic and define security requirements for platform hardware and system software. Arm developed a Platform Abstraction Interface, made available to Akraino blueprints, to securely access the platform’s runtime services and secure devices.

Arm is also a leading contributor of the Akraino blueprint family, ” Project Cassini for a Cloud Native Edge,” This BP family provides a common API for hardware security and cryptographic services in a platform-agnostic way, helping to keep workloads decoupled from physical platform details,  which then enables cloud-native delivery flow within the data center and at the edge.

What advice do you give to organizations who want to get involved in the LF Edge community?

If you are a deployer, and you think about your specific use case, come to LF Edge to navigate which project you feel like to get involved in. Solution Showcase will give you ideas you want to deploy for Telco, Energy, or Retail, etc.

If you are a developer, you want to figure out whether you want to apply multi-cloud multi-tenancy in vRouter, using Tensung Fabric, or just want it to integrate MindSpore to KubeFlow on KubeEdge? LF Edge has a wide spectrum for developers to play, join our slack channel, and ask any questions.

About LF Edge:

LF Edge is an umbrella organization to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system. With the support of 29 Premier members, 28 General members and 14 associate members, LF Edge hosts 11 projects including Akraino, EdgeX Foundry, Project EVE and more. 

Advance the future of edge computing with LF Edge and become a paying member.