Skip to main content
Category

EdgeX Foundry

Key New Usability and Security Features in Major EdgeX V3 Release Help It Stand Out as the Leading Open Source Edge Data Platform

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry, Project Release

I am delighted to announce the release of the latest and greatest version of EdgeX Foundry the open source edge data platform. Version 3.0 is our most significant upgrade to date and I firmly believe will bring much value to edge solution developers in a variety of industrial sectors.

As the EdgeX TSC chair and product manager of IOTech’s commercial EdgeX-based solutions, I’d like to explain what EdgeX V3 brings and describe how the platform continues to be the key framework upon which companies rely when developing their commercial edge software solutions.

A jump of major version is significant for EdgeX, not only because it indicates a new set of key features for its user base, but also because it shows the mature, yet evolutionary outlook of the base platform and the associated commercial edge products that are available in the ecosystem.

EdgeX Reminder

EdgeX Foundry is an open source edge data platform, managed and hosted under the Linux Foundation Edge umbrella. More specifically, EdgeX is a highly flexible and scalable architecture that allows easy interoperability between edge devices and applications. It is made possible thanks to an ecosystem of community collaborators (including Intel, IOTech, Canonical, Eaton, Beechwoods and many others) representing a variety of industries.

Minnesota

To help in its identification, each release of EdgeX is provided a codename based on a geographical location. The previous version was named Levski (located in Bulgaria). The next stopping point on our virtual world tour is Minnesota! Aptly named, in part for being a key industrial center of the United States, EdgeX Minnesota helps to further serve the needs of OT/IT integration at the edge.

The major jump in version number lets us make more significant updates to the framework and allows us the freedom to make changes that are otherwise prohibited by our minor version compatibility rules. Of course, we try to be backwards compatible where possible, but after two years of V2 minor releases, there are some key updates and usability benefits we can now bring in…

Easier, Common Configuration

The main theme of Minnesota is usability. In particular, the way the user configures EdgeX has been much simplified and improved. Version 3.0 of EdgeX introduces a common configuration pattern for the EdgeX microservices. Since many config options (logging, telemetry, security, database and message bus settings) apply across multiple microservices, we’ve added the ability to configure these in a single common location. Some microservices are likely to have common config requirements, e.g., the southbound device services or northbound application services, so we’ve provided a layered design where users can configure settings at their chosen level.

This will save developers and deployers of EdgeX systems a lot of time and reduce maintenance effort. It will be much easier to make config changes, rerun the system and be confident that the settings have all taken effect appropriately. Take a look at the latest EdgeX docs for the details.

Reduced Config Formats

The jump in major version has also allowed us to reduce the number of different config file formats in EdgeX. Removing TOML and using only YAML and JSON going forward helps reduce what a new user has to learn. YAML and JSON can be derived from each other, so we let users pick their favorite and work with that. Again, usage of the platform becomes easier and more maintainable.

Service Authentication

Another big feature for 3.0 is the addition of microservice authentication within EdgeX. When run in secure mode, the microservices now require a validated authentication token before they are allowed to communicate. Thanks to the efforts of the EdgeX Security Working Group, this is all built into the platform with tokens issued by the Secret Store service. The security advancements here also allow version 3 to switch to a much lighter-weight API Gateway service than was used previously, which helps a lot with our ongoing effort to minimize the footprint of the platform.

Other V3 Updates

Of course, we also have V3 versions of the EdgeX APIs. We do have some minor changes there including updates to help with the automatic discovery of devices, but the APIs are mature so there aren’t the major updates we had with the previous major jump. You can check out the full set of changes in the EdgeX V3 migration guide.  Full release notes are here.

Using EdgeX V3 and Joining in

We’re expecting that the next version after this (3.1 or Napa) planned for Q4 this year, will become the new Long Term Support (LTS) version of EdgeX. Those users wishing to jump from the previous LTS (2.1 or Jakarta) should start to become familiar with the new features. There are some breaking changes, so we encourage you to start to get to know V3 sooner rather than later. The features put into EdgeX Minnesota will serve as the basis for other features for the next few years. For example, using URLs to point to configuration and profiles that could come from anywhere and be shared is only possible because of the common configuration feature added now.

So please do go ahead and download EdgeX V3. A good place to get going is the Getting Started Guide and the lively EdgeX discussions board is a great place to chat and leave feedback.

Edgex Foundry Goes Full Message Bus With Its Latest EdgeX 2.3 “Levski” Release

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry, Project Release
EdgeX Foundry now fully embraces decoupled message bus communication within the platform

I am delighted to announce today the availability of the EdgeX Foundry 2.3 release which is codenamed Levski. This is the project’s 11th official release since its inception in 2017 and includes some significant new features and benefits to users that I’ll explain in this blog.

Having been elected as the chair of the EdgeX Technical Steering Committee (TSC) earlier this summer, it’s great to be able to announce the news of this release but it really is the technical expertise and dedication of the EdgeX development team that helps bring these releases to the wider community. Thanks again for everyone’s effort here. Great to be part of a group of many different companies and individuals working together to make great open source edge software.

What is Levski?

First let me give mention to the Levski codename. As you may know, each EdgeX release is named after a certain place or location in the world, with the specific place chosen each time significant contributors to the project. This version was named by two long term EdgeX contributors, Diana Atanasova and Malini B

handaru, both from VMware. For version 2.3 and the letter “L”, we come back over to Europe because Levski is a large mountain in the beautiful European country of Bulgaria. Bulgaria is also Diana’s homeland so it’s nice to be able to recognize that with the naming of this release.

New in EdgeX 2.3 – More about the Message Bus

Perhaps the biggest single new feature is the enhancement to support the delivery of commands via the EdgeX message bus.

We’ve previously made great strides in EdgeX V2 by delivering data from the southside (from devices and sensors) to the northside (to the core and application layers) via an internal message bus. This release also adds the support in the other direction, i.e., from the northside (the application layers and core layers) down to the southside (the devices and sensors) on the same message bus. Previously the southbound communication was exclusively via REST. Moving to support message bus-based communication in both directions is a big advancement and brings key benefits in terms of reduced latency and increased scalability. The asynchronous communication and the QoS-based control that you get from the message bus implementations that you can choose adds delivery guarantees and retransmissions of messages as needed.

Message Bus

More Run-Time Data

Another key area of development for Levski has been the focus on providing EdgeX users with more live information about how the system is running. EdgeX 2.3 adds System or “Control Plane” Events that can provide live updates as to what is happening. For example, users can receive notifications that new devices are added or that there has been a network disconnection from a specific device.

Somewhat related to System Events are the Telemetry Metrics. In contrast to events though, the metrics provide numeric information relating to how the platform is operating. Examples include the number of data readings that are persisted by core data or the number of secrets or tokens that are stored. Building of what was delivered previously, Levski adds more metrics across all of the services.

All of this information can be collected and reported however the user sees fit. In addition, the System Events and Telemetry Metrics mechanisms are available for users to add their own metrics as needed.

Many other updates and enhancements

There are many other new additions in this last release cycle including:

  • Availability of NATS as alternative implementation of the internal EdgeX Message Bus. NATS is a popular and lightweight protocol with native delivery of EdgeX messages and potential advantages in high availability (HA) use cases
  • Authenticated access to the MQTT message bus
  • Securing of the Consul registry service with access tokens
  • Passing status at the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF)
  • Initial construction of the EdgeX STRIDE threat model
  • Improving the EdgeX development process with a new Use Case Requirements (UCRs) phase in the design procedure

See the release notes here for full details of what the Levski release provides.

New adopters and use cases for EdgeX

Running as a mature, stage 3 Linux Foundation project, there are now many users and adopters of EdgeX technology around the world. That includes users who download and deploy the open source EdgeX code, but also users of commercial products (including ours at IOTech) that are based on EdgeX. Take a look at some of the companies who are users of EdgeX. There are also a good set of presentation videos from different adopters of the technology.

One of my personal aims as TSC chair is to help encourage the adoption and wider use of EdgeX. Thanks to Building System Integrators (BSI) who recorded a talk at a recent TSC meeting. It would be great to hear from more companies who would like to do something similar. Please do reach out to me to arrange it.

What’s coming next?

Each release marks a busy period where of course we finalize the current version, but already we are looking forward at what we can achieve in the next release. Codenamed Minnesota and expected to be version 3.0, we are looking to add new features to help with the scalable configuration of EdgeX. Tune into the Minnesota technical planning conference that we are running next week where we will scope out what we can do. As always, attendance and contributions are very welcome.

Thanks again to everyone who had a hand in this release, and we look forward to more successful releases in the future.

Your Guide to LF Edge (+ Related) Sessions at ONE Summit

By Akraino, Blog, EdgeX Foundry, Event, Home Edge, LF Edge, Open Horizon, Project EVE

In case you missed it, the ONE Summit agenda is now live! With 70+ sessions delivered by speakers from over 50 organizations, at ONE Summit, you can meet industry experts who will share their edge computing knowledge across 5G, factory floor, Smart Home, Robotics, government, Metaverse, and VR use cases, using LF Edge projects including Akraino, EdgeX Foundry, EVE and more.

Save your seat for the ONE Summit today and add these edge sessions to your schedule. We hope to see you in Seattle, WA November 15-16!

Tuesday, November 15:

9:00am – 9:15am

11:30am – 12:00pm

12:10pm – 12:40pm

12:10pm – 12:40pm

2:00pm – 2:30pm

2:40pm – 3:10pm

  • Proliferation of Edge Computing in Smart Home
    • Speakers:
      • Suresh Lalapet Chakravarthy, Staff Engineer, Samsung R&D Institute India – Bangalore
      • Nitu Sajjanlal Gupta, Lead Engineer, Samsung R&D Institute India – Bangalore
    • Featured LF project: Home Edge

3:40pm – 4:10pm

3:54pm – 4:01pm

4:20pm – 4:50pm

  • 4:20pm – 5:30pm
    • Featured LF project: Project EVE
Wednesday, November 16

11:30am – 12:00pm

12:10pm – 12:40pm

2:00pm – 2:30pm

  • Deploying and Automating at the Edge
    • Speakers:
      • William Brooke Frischemeier, SR. Director Head Of Product Management Unified Cloud BU, Rakuten Symphony
      • Mehran Hadipour, VP- BD & tech Alliances, Rakuten Symphony

3:40pm – 4:10pm

4:20pm – 4:50pm

4:20pm – 5:30pm

Hurry! Early Bird (Corporate) registration closes September 9! Bookmark the ONE Summit website to easily find updates as more event news is announced, and follow LF Edge on Twitter to hear more about the event. We hope to see you in Seattle soon!

 

Preventive Healthcare using Intelligent Edge IoT Computing – ‘Round the Clock EHR’

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

By:  Utpal Mangla – Industry EDGE Cloud – IBM Cloud Platform;  Atul Gupta – Lead Data Architect – IBMLuca Marchi – Industry EDGE and Distribute Cloud – IBM Cloud Platform; and Saurabh Agrawal – Practice Lead, Network Cloud, 5G & EDGE 

Preventive healthcare has always been taught and talked about in most healthcare institutions, but seldom practiced. The collective benefits are immense, and the realization of a fraction of those benefits can help optimize the cost-delivery aspects of healthcare services. It can also act as a catalyst for scaling healthcare services for growing populations in most parts of the world. 

The common issues in implementing Preventive Healthcare include providing guidance, educating the vulnerable population masses, and interacting with healthcare professionals. Most of the challenges in regular screenings or monitoring of diabetes, cholesterol, cancer, and mental health are known cost and labor related issues.

Technology has helped to achieve some primary objectives, but the ultimate goal is still far away. IoT and Robotics solutions have been deployed in healthcare facilities and continue to advance quickly.  But with new tools, techniques, and cloud infrastructure,  it’s time for innovative new solutions that come with  emerging IoT devices, like increased connectivity, speed, and lower costs. 

 

Intelligent Edge IoT can provide intense data gathering and processing before sending the prepared data into the Health Ecosystem. Early on, IoT’s were mostly sensors used to gather data and were often cumbersome when it came to software code updates, and they didn’t have enough compute power to run any data processing. The new generation of intelligent IoT’s, which can be deployed at the Edge, can compute and process data ahead of sending it to Cloud computing functions for more sophisticated analysis, including machine learning and deep learning algorithms.

These intelligent IoT’s once deployed as human wearables, facility sensors, etc. can transform EHR (Electronic Health Record) to next generation 24x7x365 EHR (Round the Clock EHR)

This innovation of ‘Round the Clock EHR’ can transform the healthcare industry by bringing healthcare professionals much closer to patients in understanding and diagnosing medical issues early on. It can continuously stream and feed data to ML (machine learning), DL (deep learning) algorithms to help and improve AI solutions. The risk factors can be constantly monitored, thresholds can be adjusted and re-calibrated in real-time with sophisticated software. The Preventive healthcare can not only detect the early signs but also feed it to research facilities for new research programs and eliminate unnecessary analysis. 

The Preventive care strategies which also encompass social and environmental conditions can now be monitored with the ‘Round the Clock EHR’, which contains the patient or potential-patient data along with their detailed data on living conditions, geographical conditions, social setup which may trigger onset of a disease or unfavorable conditions. On a larger scale, the Healthcare ecosystem data and ‘Round the Clock EHR’ can provide feed into wider studies to generate health patterns as people move and Preventive Healthcare can lead to new advancements.

As referenced in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537222/ [Prevention Strategies Lisa A. Kisling; Joe M Das.] – Primary prevention consists of measures aimed at a susceptible population or individual. Secondary prevention emphasizes early disease detection, and its target is healthy-appearing individuals with subclinical forms of the disease. Tertiary prevention targets both the clinical and outcome stages of a disease.

Analyzing these 3 preventive healthcare areas from the ‘Data and Intelligent Edge IoT Lens’, it is apparent that the commonality is gathering, processing, and providing good quality round-the-clock granular data to most sophisticated ML, DL algorithms can definitely transform this area of healthcare transformation.

Our advancing society needs blend of medical and technology research implemented in a way to foster growth, scalability, improvements at lower cost and implementation cycles. These de-coupled solutions are easy to implement and promote wider Healthcare ecosystem in our connected social network.

References: 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537222/ [Prevention Strategies Lisa A. Kisling; Joe M Das.]

Congratulations to the Recipients of the 2022 EdgeX Awards!

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

By Jim White, outgoing EdgeX Foundary TSC Chair

Each year since its founding, EdgeX Foundry awards at least four members of its contributing community with Contribution and Innovation awards.  On this fifth anniversary of the project’s founding, we honored seven distinguished engineers for their efforts on the project.

Innovation Award

Presented to individuals who have provided the most innovative solution to the open-source project over the past year

Byron Nevis and Jim Wang (both from Intel) designed and implemented the new “Delayed Start Services” security capability which is an innovative way to handle providing security tokens to services that start after the EdgeX security framework has started and already handed out tokens to all the known services.  Bryon and Jim have led most EdgeX security efforts over the past two years.  But this year, they provided some real innovation around securely storing secrets, distributing secrets, and making secrets available to other services.  Their innovation will allow adopters to add new device services and application services to EdgeX over time and as use cases demand without requiring a restart of the system.

Anthony Casagrande and Marc Fuller (both from Intel) have been instrumental in Intel’s use of EdgeX to show how it can be a platform in support of retail edge use cases.  Anthony/Marc’s work has provided both a device service and an application service to ingest and use RFID information via the LLRP (Low Level Reader Protocol) which is used in bar code reading equipment found in many retail store locations.  In addition to their inventions of these ingesting and using services, Anthony and Marc have found (and in some cases fixed) a number of bugs and have identified many needed features (submitting more than 25 Github issues) that real world adopters of the platform need.

Emilo Reyes (again from Intel – there seems to be a theme here!) has been a contributor to the EdgeX DevOps team for the last few years and has been a vital part of making the EdgeX community a better, more streamlined community. Emilio has passion for quality and with his experience around unit testing, has contributed hundreds of tests for our Jenkins global pipeline libraries providing us continuous confidence in our ability to deliver quality code. Emilio also has a passion for automation and has been a driving force behind much of our GitHub automation for EdgeX.   For instance, he created automated management of GitHub labels and milestones from a central repository, greatly reducing the number of repetitive tasks needed to manage labels/milestones across 20+ repositories. 

Contribution Award

Recognizes individuals who have contributed leadership and helped EdgeX Foundry advance and continue momentum in the past year.

 

Iain Anderson (from IOTech Systems) – has been a solid contributor, working group leader, and architect/thought leader since the founding of EdgeX in 2017.  As Device Service chairman, he has overseen several releases (major and minor) and is currently responsible for 11 active EdgeX device services and helping to usher in 4 more that are in active development.  He is the project’s first and foremost authority in C development and personally handles most of the C device service and SDK development.  Iain has over 530 commits to the project (almost 50K lines of code) which puts him #6 all time on the project.  He is also #7 in all time Pull Request submissions for the project.  He is a quiet, steadfast, never-a-complaint contributor that has championed many of the project’s advances such as device service and device profile simplifications, message bus communications from device services, device filtering, and future device service record and replay features.

 

Siggi Skulason (from Canonical) – updated and significantly improved the EdgeX CLI tool over the course of the last two release cycles.  Importantly, Siggi upgraded the tool from the V1 APIs to the V2 APIs, added support for all the service endpoints (versus a small subset selection of APIs), made the CLI available as a snap, removed a significant amount of technical debt, and improved the products help and documentation.  

 

I am happy to honor and call out these gentlemen for their efforts.  I don’t know of too many open-source projects that go to honor and thank its contributors with awards like this.  To be nominated and then selected by your peers – especially of the caliber of the EdgeX engineering community – is such a great recognition of their work.  Congratulations Bryon, Jim, Anthony, Marc, Emilo, Iain and Siggi.  Jobs well done.

You can view the Awards presentation here:

 

Thank You EdgeX

It’s been a productive few months – one release out, another planned and being worked on, and a time to shell out some well earned “kudos”.  Before I go, I want to let the community know  I am stepping aside from my role as TSC chair, and a new set of leaders are stepping up to take EdgeX into its future – and a bright future it has.

About a month after I joined Dell Technologies in 2015, I was handed the task of finding an IoT software platform to put on our new brand of gateways.  EdgeX began life on my kitchen island with an idea, an architecture and a small bit of code.  With the support of the company, some great leaders, and a collection of some of the brightest engineers I have ever worked with, my work was expanded on, productized and launched as the edge software you know today.  For the past seven years (almost to the day), EdgeX has been at the center of my professional working life (and my wife would probably add that it included much of my personal life).  Creating it, taking it into open source, working with the Linux Foundation to make it available and known, working at IOTech to commercialize the idea, and leading this wonderful community has been the highlight of my career.  It has allowed me to travel the world, meet so many amazing people, be a part of an incredible creative process, and watch something I started get used to create solutions that help people all over the globe.  EdgeX has exceeded even my wildest dreams.  It’s just hard to wrap my brain around it even today.  I am no Einstein.  But if you have an idea (even a moderately good idea), find some amazing people around you that can help turn the idea into reality, and you can catch lightning in a bottle.

I would need a separate blog post to thank everyone I owe for this experience and the success of EdgeX.  That is not an exaggeration.  “Thank you” is not enough but to the EdgeX community, people I worked with at Dell and those in my current home of IOTech Systems, I hope you take it as a small down payment for all I owe you.

I’ll close by suggesting that if anyone ever offers you the chance to work on, let alone start, an open-source project – jump at the opportunity.  You will be better for the experience.  I’ll paraphrase Winston Churchill – many forms of software development have been tried and will be tried in this world.  No one pretends that open-source development is perfect or all-wise.  Indeed, it has been said that open-source development is the worst form of software development except for all other forms that have been tried.  

EdgeX – small at the edge, but forever big in my heart.

EdgeX Foundry Issues Bug Fix Release (v2.1.1) of its EdgeX Jakarta Release

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry
The EdgeX Foundry project, a highly-scalable and flexible open source framework that facilitates interoperability between devices and applications at the IoT edge, issued a bug fix release (version 2.1.1) of the EdgeX Jakarta release.  Importantly, as Jakarta is under long-term-support (LTS), this new bug fix release addresses a critical Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) issue.  Adopters using the Jakarta LTS release should upgrade immediately to this bug fix release.  The CVE is documented on the project’s GitHub site.  In addition, this bug fix release also addresses some less critical bugs that were identified and fixed through the Kamakura release cycle.  Details on what is in version 2.1.1 can be found on the project’s Wiki site.
All of the fixes in this Jakarta dot release are already available in the Kamakura release (the latest, but non-LTS, release from EdgeX).  Adopters of Kamakura do not need to make any changes as the CVE and other bug fixes are already part of the latest EdgeX release.

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.

 

###

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.

EdgeX Foundry Turns 5 Years Old & Issues its 10th Release

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

By Jim White, EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee Chair

EdgeX Foundry, an LF Edge project, turned five years old in April and celebrated with its 10th release!

Today, the project announced the release of Kamakura – version 2.2 of the edge/IoT platform.  EdgeX has consistently released two versions a year (spring and fall) since its founding in 2017.  Looking back to the founding and announcement of the project at Hannover Messe 2017, I would be lying if I was to say I expected the project to be where it is today.

Many new startup businesses don’t last five years. For EdgeX to celebrate five years, steadily provide new releases of the platform each year, and continue to grow its community of adopters is quite an achievement.  It speaks both to the need for an open edge / IoT platform and the commitment and hard work of the developers on the project.  I am very proud of what this community has accomplished.

We’ll take a closer look at EdgeX highlights over the past five years in an upcoming blog post, so for now, let’s dive into the Kamakura release. 

 

Here’s an overview of what’s new:

Kamakura Features

While this “dot” release follows on the heels of the project’s first ever long-term support release (Jakarta in the fall of 2021), the Kamakura release still contains a number of new features while still maintaining backward compatibility with all 2.x releases.  Notably, with this release, EdgeX has added:

  • Metrics Telemetry collection: EdgeX is about collecting sensor/device information and making that data available to analytics packages and enterprise systems in a consistent way so it can be acted on.  However, EdgeX had only minimal means to report on its own health or status.  An adopter could watch EdgeX service container memory or CPU usage or use the “ping” facility to make sure the service was still responsive, but that is about it.  In the Kamakura release, new service level metrics can be collected and sent through the EdgeX message bus to be consumed and monitored.  Some initial metrics collection is provided in the core data service (ex: number of events and reading persisted) for this release, but the framework for doing this system wide is now in place to offer more in the next release or allow an adopter to instrument other services to report their metrics telemetry as they see fit.  The metrics information can be easily subscribed to by a time series database, dashboard or custom monitoring application.

 

  • Delayed Start Services:  When EdgeX is running with security enabled, an initialization service (called security-secretstore-setup) provides each EdgeX micro service with a token which is used to access the EdgeX secrets store (provided by Vault).  These tokens have a time to live (TTL) which means if they were not used or renewed, they expired.  This created problems for services that may need to start later – especially those that are going to connect to future sensors/devices.  Furthermore, not all EdgeX services are known when the platform initializes.  An adopter may choose to add new connectors (both north and south) all the time to address new needs.   These types of issues and others often meant that adopters often had to shutdown EdgeX and restart all of EdgeX in order to provide new security tokens to all services.  In Kamakura, this issue has been addressed with a new service that uses mutual authentication TLS and exchanges a SPIFFE X.509 SVID for getting secret store tokens.  This new service allows a service to get or renew a token used to access the EdgeX secrets store anytime and not just at the bootstrapping / initialization of EdgeX as a whole.

 

  • New Camera Device Services:  While EdgeX somewhat supported connectivity to ONVIF cameras through a camera device service, the service was incomplete (for example not allowing the camera’s PTZ capability to be accessed).  With Kamakura, EdgeX will now have two camera device services.  A new ONVIF camera device service is more complete and tested against server popular camera devices.  It allows for PTZ and even the discovery of ONVIF compliant cameras.  A second camera service – a USB camera service – will help manage and monitor simple webcams.  Importantly, EdgeX will, through the USB camera service, be able to get a USB camera’s video stream to other packages (such as an AI/ML engine) to incorporate visual inference results into the EdgeX data sensor fusion capability.

 

  • Dynamic Device Profiles: in prior releases, device profiles were considered mostly static.  That is, once a device profile was used and associated to a device or any other EdgeX object like an event/reading, it was not allowed to change.  One could not, for example, have an empty device profile and add device resources (the sensor points collected by a device service) later as more details of the sensor or use case emerged.  With the Kamakura release, device profiles are much more dynamic in nature.  New resources can be added all the time.  Elements of the device profile can change over time.  This allows device profiles to be more flexible and adaptive to the sensors and use case needs without having to remove and re-add devices all the time.

 

  • V2 of the CLI:  EdgeX has had a command line interface tool for several releases.  But the tool was not completely updated to EdgeX 2.0 until this latest release.  For that matter, the CLI did not offer the ability to call on all 100% of the EdgeX APIs.  With Kamakura, the CLI now provides 100% coverage of the REST APIs (any call that can be done via REST can be done through the CLI) in addition to making the CLI tool compatible with EdgeX 2.0 instances.  Several new features were added as well to include tab completion, use of the registry to provide configuration, and improved result outputs.

The EdgeX community worked on many other features/fixes and behind the scenes improvements to include:

  • Updated LLRP/RFID device service and application services
  • Added or updated GPIO and CoAP services 
  • Ability to build EdgeX services on Windows platform (providing optional inclusion of ZMQ libraries as needed)
  • CORs enablement
  • Added additional testing – especially around the optional use of services
  • Added testing to the GUI
  • Optimized the dev ops CI/CD pipelines
  • Kubernetes Helm Chart example for EdgeX
  • Added linting (the automated checking of source code for programmatic, stylistic and security issues) part of the regular build checks and tests on all service pull requests
  • Formalized release and planning meeting schedule
  • Better tracking of project decisions through new GitHub project boards

Tech Talks

When EdgeX first got started, we provided a series of webinars called Tech Talks to help educate people on what EdgeX is and how it works.  We are announcing that a new Tech Talk webinar series will begin May 24 and run weekly through June.  The topic list includes:

  •   May 24 – Getting Started with EdgeX
  •   June 7 – Build an EdgeX Application Service
  •   June 14 – Build an EdgeX Device Service
  •   June 21 – Creating a Device Profile
  •   June 28 – Getting started with EdgeX Snaps

These talks will be presented by distinguished members of our community.  We are going to livestream them through YouTube at 9am PDT on the appointed days.  These new talks will help provide instruction in the new EdgeX 2.0 APIs introduced with the Ireland release.  You can register for the talks here:

What’s Next: Fall Release – “Levski”

Planning for the fall 2022 release of EdgeX – codenamed Levski – is underway and will be reported on this site soon.  As part of the Kamakura release cycle, several architectural decision records were created which set the foundation for many new features in the fall release.  This includes a north-south messaging subsystem and standardization of units of measure in event/readings. 

 EdgeX is 5, but its future still looks long and bright.