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EdgeX Foundry

EdgeX Foundry Welcomes New Contributors!

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

Written by Aaron Williams, LF Edge Developer Advocate

The EdgeX Foundry community has been blessed with a large number of active contributors over the last three years, with many of those being with us since launch.  But all communities need new members and different perspectives to continue to improve and grow.  Yet, we know that it can be intimidating to post your first contribution to an open source project.  As such, we want to take a moment and thank the following people who posted their first contribution to EdgeX Foundry in Q1 of 2020.

Q1 New Contributors:

  • jluous
  • Aricg
  • jinlinGuan
  • kaisawind
  • venkata-subbareddyK
  • kurokobo
  • venkata-lakshmi-penna
  • worldmaomao
  • DaveZLB

You can find these contributors on github and see what other projects they are working on. We encourage our new contributors to keep up the great work and we look forward to their next contribution.  You are helping to improve and grow EdgeX and our community. Thank you for all your help!

If you would like to learn more about EdgeX Foundry,  the world’s first plug and play ecosystem-enabled open platform for the IoT Edge, visit the Getting Started page. You’ll learn more about the project and get  step-by-step directions about how to start your EdgeX journey.

EdgeX Foundry has global industry support LF Edge members and open source contributors. EdgeX offers the opportunity to collaborate on IoT solutions built using existing connectivity standards combined with their own proprietary innovations.

In fact, EdgeX Foundry recently announced the sixth release in its roadmap – the Geneva release offers simplified deployment, optimized analytics, secure connectivity for multiple devices and more robust security. Learn more about the Geneva release:

Visit the EdgeX Foundry website for more information or join our Slack to ask questions and engage with community members. If you are not already a member of our community, it is really easy to join.  Simply visit our wiki page and/or check out our Git Hub and help us get to the next 6 million and more downloads!

June 18, 2020

EdgeX Foundry Use Case: Wipro’s Surface Quality Inspection for a Manufacturing Plant

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry, Use Cases

Written by LF Edge members from Wipro. For more information about Wipro, visit their website.

The use case is “Automated surface quality inspection” for a manufacturing plant that produces “Piston Rods” used in different applications like Utility, Mining, Construction and Earth Moving.

In the manufacturing plant, the production of piston rods goes through multiple stages like induction hardening, friction welding, threading & polishing.  Each of these stages have a quality checkpoint to detect defects in early stages and to ensure that the rods produced are in line with design specifications & function properly.  After it goes through rigorous multi stage process, it reaches final station where surface level quality inspection happens.  At this stage, the quality inspection happens manually, requiring highly skilled & experienced human inspector to look for different types of defects like scratches, material defects & handling defects on the surface of rods.  Based on the final quality inspection results, it goes either to packaging & shipment area or to rework or scrap area.

Quality check at every stage is extremely critical to prevent quality problems down the line leading to recalls & reputational damages.  The problem with manual inspections – they are costly, time consuming and heavily dependent on human intelligence & judgement.  “Automated surface quality inspection” is an image analytics solution based on AI / ML that helps overcome these challenges.  The solution identifies and classifies defects based on image analytics to enable quality assessment and provides real-time visibility to Key Performance Indicators through dashboards to monitor plant performance.

EdgeX architectural tenets, production grade readily available edge software stack, visibility of long term support with bi-annual release roadmap and user friendly licensing for commercial deployments made us adopt EdgeX as the base software stack.

The readily available IoT gateway functionalities helped us focus more on building business application specific components than the core software stack needed for an edge gateway.  This helped us in rapid development of proof of concept for the use case we envisioned.

Key components of the solution include:

  • Edge Gateway hardware, Industrial grade camera & a sensor to detect piston rods placed in final quality inspection station
  • Software components:
    • Gateway powered by EdgeX software stack with enhancements to support the use case
    • Deep learning model trained with previously analyzed & classified defects
    • Intel’s OpenVino toolkit for maximizing inference performance on the edge gateway
    • EdgeX Device Service Layer enhancements to enable missing southbound connectivity
    • Automated decision making in the edge by leveraging EdgeX provided local analytics capability
    • EdgeX AppSDK customizations to connect to business applications hosted on cloud
    • Manufacturing Performance Dashboard to define, create and monitor Key Performance Indicators

Once the rod reaches inspection station, the gateway triggers the camera to take surface pictures.  The image captured is fed into the inference engine running on gateway, which looks for the presence of different types of surface defects.  The inference output is fed into the business application hosted on cloud to provide actionable insights with rich visual aids.

The analysis of historical data for similar pattern of defects, correlating data from OT systems with inference output for a given time period and providing feedback to OT systems for potential corrective actions are possible future enhancements.

Benefits:

  • Reduced inspection cost: Automated quality inspections, reduced need for manual inspection
  • Centralized management: Real time visibility to plant operations from remote locations
  • Consistent performance: Less dependency on human judgement, which varies from one person to another
  • Reduced inspection time: Consistent & reliable results in a much shorter time
  • Learning on the go: Continuous retraining of deep learning models make automated inspections accurate & closer to reality
  • Available 24 x 7

If you have questions or would like more information about this use case or LF Edge member Wipro, please email naga.shanmugam@wipro.com.

June 9, 2020

EdgeX Foundry Hits Major Milestone with 5 Million+ Container Downloads and a New Release that Simplifies Deployment for AI, Data Analytics and Digital Transformation

By Announcement, EdgeX Foundry, LF Edge
  • EdgeX’s sixth release (Geneva) offers more scalable and secure solutions to move more data faster from multiple edge devices to cloud, enterprise and on-premises applications.
  • As one of LF Edge’s Stage 3 Projects, EdgeX Foundry is seeing increased community growth and adoption and deployments.
  • New LF Edge project Open Horizon is building an integration project that will demonstrate automated delivery and lifecycle management of EdgeX Foundry as a containerized application.

SAN FRANCISCO – May 21, 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 a major milestone of hitting 5 million container downloads and the availability of its “Geneva” release. This release offers more robust security, optimized analytics, and secure connectivity for multiple devices.

“EdgeX Foundry is committed to developing an open IoT platform for edge-related applications and shows no signs of slowing down the momentum,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “As one of the Stage 3 projects under LF Edge, EdgeX Foundry is a clear example of how member collaboration and diversity are the keys to creating an interoperable open source framework across 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.

Currently, there are more than 170 unique contributors to the project and EdgeX Foundry averages one million container downloads a month, with a total of 5 million reached last month, and rising.

“The massive volume of devices coming online represents a huge opportunity for innovation and is making edge computing a necessity,” said Keith Steele, EdgeX Foundry Chair of the Technical Steering Committee. “With at least 50% of data being stored, processed and analyzed at the edge we need an open, cloud-native edge ecosystem enabled by EdgeX to minimize reinvention and facilitate building and deploying distributed, interoperable applications from the edge to the cloud. In 3 short years, EdgeX has achieved incredible global momentum and is now being designed into IOT systems and product roadmaps.”

The Geneva Release

As the sixth release in the EdgeX Foundry roadmap, Geneva offers simplified deployment, optimized analytics, secure connectivity for multiple devices and more robust security. Key features include:

  • Automate on-boarding: simplify, scale and quicken connection of devices by allowing automatic provisioning of devices
  • Improved Performance: A new rules engine that is written in Go for faster performance, a smaller footprint and more memory
  • Connectivity: Improved bandwidth utilization and efficiency through use of new batch and send capabilities provided in the App Functions SDK
  • Secure Authentication: Store and use/authenticate secrets to connect with cloud providers
  • Testing: New integration and backward compatibility testing along with enhanced security and blackbox testing

EdgeX Foundry works closely with several of the other LF Edge projects such as Akraino Edge Stack and new project Open Horizon. During this release cycle, EdgeX was made to work under the Akraino Edge Lightweight IOT (ELIOT) Blueprint and tested under the Akraino Community Lab.

Launched last month, Open Horizon is a platform for managing the service software lifecycle of containerized workloads and related machine learning assets. Open Horizon is building an integration project that will demonstrate delivery and management of EdgeX Foundry as a containerized solution in stages, beginning with a single deployable unit and then progressing to a more modular set of services and alternate delivery targets.

Support from Contributing Members and Users of EdgeX Foundry:

 “To further enhance use in production environments, EdgeX Foundry’s Geneva release brings simplified deployments and improved security,” said Tony Espy, Technical Architect at Canonical. “With EdgeX available as a snap, this aligns to the fundamentals of snaps’ core principles which allow developers to benefit from confinement and transactional updates to ensure deployments are secure and with minimal need for manual intervention. As the EdgeX ecosystem continues to see strong traction, we look forward to continuing our contribution to building an open, interoperable framework for edge computing.”

“EdgeX Foundry’s middleware solution is an important component of an open, vendor-neutral pipeline connecting IoT devices and their data to analytics and data management at the on-premise edge,” said Joe Pearson, Engineering Strategy & Innovation Leader, Edge Computing, IBM. “This latest release underscores the importance of working within LF Edge to encourage interoperability as we build a comprehensive open edge computing framework, beginning with Open Horizon.”

“With the evolution of IoT and edge computing, there is a growing realization to deploy and run compute engines near the data source in a truly globally distributed manner. This architecture requires running intelligent AI-based functionality at the edge while processing a significant amount of data at high-throughput and low latency on small form-factor devices,” said Yiftach Shoolman, CTO and co-founder at Redis Labs. “EdgeX Foundry with Redis as the primary data store provides an open-source data platform to meet these expectations by combining in-memory data processing with modern data-models, and can be extended with a serverless engine and AI-serving platform.”

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.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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May 21, 2020

EdgeX Foundry’s Geneva Release and Plans for Hanoi

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

Written by Jim White, Co-Chair of the EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee and CTO of IOTech

Every six months, the EdgeX Foundry technical community gets together to review its recent release (collecting lessons learned, assembling release notes, etc.) and to plan out its next release.  For the last three years, these meetings have been face-to-face events held in venues across the globe.  It has become an event which many in the community have come to enjoy as it allows us to celebrate our success, plan out the next release, and at the same time reconnect with people that have become close professional friends.

Alas, the global pandemic claimed another causality – albeit a far less important one in relation to world events – when we had to cancel our face-to-face meeting this spring.  We held a virtual event instead and, though different, it was still fun and successful – thanks to the incredible efforts of the development community that has been the life blood of the project since the project’s inception.  We had more than 35 members attending the online sessions each day and managed to get everything accomplished that we planned and even had time for a mini-educational conference (called the “Unconference”) that allowed community members to highlight new EdgeX-based solutions and new project ideas.

The Geneva Release

Our planning meeting is always at the tail end of our current release efforts.  We have an EdgeX development “freeze” period, which means no more feature coding can be done as we clean up bugs and tackle documentation.

Codenamed “Geneva” – this is is EdgeX Foundry’s sixth release but the first for 2020. The highlights of the Geneva release include:

  • Dynamic or automatic device on-boarding – for protocols where it makes sense, this allows EdgeX to automatically provision new sensors and have the sensor data start to flow through EdgeX
  • Alternate messaging support – where applicable, allows adopters to use any messaging implementation under the covers of EdgeX to include MQTT, 0MQ, or Redis Streams.
  • Better type information is associated to sensor data – allowing analytics packages and other users of EdgeX sensor data to more easily digest the data and aid in transformations on the data
  • REST device service
  • Batch and send export – allowing sensor data to be sent to cloud, on-prem or enterprise systems at designated times
  • Support for MQTTS and HTTPS export
  • Redis as the default DB – deprecating MongoDB for license, footprint/performance, and ARM support reasons
  • Adding the Kuiper rules engine – a new rules engine that is smaller and faster and written in Go which replaces EdgeX’s last Java micro service.
  • Improved Security
  • Interoperability testing
  • Improved DevOps CI/CD – now using Jenkins Pipelines to produce EdgeX Foundry project artifacts

The Hanoi Release

As for our semi-annual planning meeting, we set up the scope of our next release which is codenamed “Hanoi.”

There are some significant notable features in this upcoming release which is scheduled to arrive in the October/November 2020 timeframe.

  • Device service to application service message bus – allowing data to “stream” more directly (faster) through EdgeX without persistence.
  • Improve support for running device services on different hosts
  • Secure service to service communications – enabling EdgeX services to live on different hosts and communicate securely
  • Data filters in the device service – allowing repetitive or meaningless sensor data to be discarded sooner in the collection process
  • Performance guidance – giving adopters better understanding of hardware requirements and data flows which can help them architect edge solutions for their use case
  • Improved interoperability testing
  • Hardware Root of Trust abstraction – allowing EdgeX’s to get its secret store master key from hardware secure storage

EdgeX APIs and the EdgeX 2.0 Future

More importantly, this release will include work on a new API set for our microservices.  We call this the V2 API set.  As the name implies, it will be the EdgeX APIs that will be featured in version 2 of EdgeX in the near future (perhaps as soon as 2021).  A portion of the V2 APIs will be available for exploration with the Hanoi release – allowing developers to experiment and test the new APIs.

During the Hanoi release, as we work on V2 API, we are making the APIs easier to use, decoupling data elements used in the message communication from the operations, and generally allowing for better security, better testing, use of different transport infrastructure, and easier extension of the APIs going forward.  So, while Hanoi is expected to be a minor version, it provides the footing for a new major release (EdgeX 2.0) next year.

We invite you to have a look at the new EdgeX release – Geneva.  Learn more here: https://www.edgexfoundry.org/release-1-2-geneva/. Here is hoping that the next six months bring health and safety back to all of our lives and that we’ll be able to reconvene the community of EdgeX Foundry experts soon.

 

May 21, 2020

EdgeX Foundry IoT Innovation Challenge – Phase 1 Complete

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

Written by Clinton Bonner, VP of Marketing for Topcoder

We recently told you about an awesome challenge series on Topcoder—focused on using on-demand talent for EdgeX Foundry IOT innovation. Often a new tech philosophy needs an enabling catalyst for it to gain traction. For the Industrial IoT, EdgeX Foundry from the Linux Foundation is that catalyst. EdgeX Foundry is a vendor-neutral open source project hosted by LF Edge building a common open framework for IoT edge computing.

In Phase 1 of this series, EdgeX Foundry tapped the Topcoder community to conceptualize new and unique industry use cases that leveraged the EdgeX Platform. The concepts were procured through this work.

Well, the winners are in! LF Edge, EdgeX Foundry and the teams from Dell Technologies, Intel, HP, IOTech, and Wipro were impressed with the wide variety of innovative use case ideas and technical explanations as to how the EdgeX stack would be leveraged.

Here are the top 5 winning submissions:

1. cunhavictor (Brazil) – Fuel Inventory Control for Oil & Gas Downstream Industry

Synopsis: Product losses during fuel tank truck’s loading and offloading operations, as well as thefts, are common problems that translate to costs estimated around $133 Billion for players in the oil & gas downstream industry. The winning idea is a system for inventory control and loss/theft assessment that joins data from different sensors in a distributed processing architecture. Data integration is usually not handled properly by fuel distribution companies and the system would solve that.  This integration not only has potential to reduce losses but help the fuel distribution company, gas station owners (retail outlets), the end user, and even refineries, to understand how inventory losses occur and to protect their assets.

“Excellent articulation of the business problem, instrumentation options, and how the data will be integrated. You have great domain expertise & clarity of thought.” – Challenge judge

2. wiebket (Netherlands)  – Clinic Occupancy Monitoring System

Synopsis: Traveling to a clinic for a checkup is expensive and time consuming for many people in South Africa. Clinic managers have little oversight into patient flow through the clinic. The clinic occupancy monitoring system uses video cameras and door sensors connected to the EdgeX platform to accurately monitor unique patient visits and real time clinic occupancy without sending patient image data to the cloud. The beneficiaries of such a system are patients, clinic managers and the National Department of Health.

3. vivkv (India) – Machinery and Power Consumption Management

Synopsis: Gather sensor data through EdgeX device services and create an application/algorithm for machinery and power consumption management through the use of advanced analytics and machine learning solutions. This would be done in an integrated manner to maximize ROI on the assets and remain closely bound to the overall business budget.

4. Gungz (Indonesia) – Factory Smart Bin

Synopsis: Create an intelligent smart bin that can send the information about its fill level (volume) and weight to EdgeX platform and then, based on the fill level (volume) of the bin, EdgeX platform can send commands to AGV (Assisted Guided Vehicle) to automatically come and empty the trash bin. Using this approach, a factory can automate its waste tracking and waste disposal without human intervention.

5. kavukcutolga (Turkey) – EdgeX Parking Management

Synopsis: This proposal aims to decrease the time, money, and pollution caused by drivers spending time trying to find a parking spot by using IoT Devices such as Object and Distance sensors.

Congratulations to the top five winners. This concludes Phase 1 of this challenge series and now we’re moving on to Phase 2. The second phase will be a challenge where members pick three of the top ideas and build a Technical Design Document detailing the Technical gameplan of how an idea would be brought to life.

We’d like to thank LF Edge, EdgeX Foundry, Dell Technologies, Intel, HP, IOTech and Wipro for pushing innovation and collaboration that accelerates the deployment of IoT solutions. If you’d like to use on-demand talent in a similar manner to accelerate your technology goals, contact Topcoder here.

For additional information about LF Edge or EdgeX Foundry:

May 19, 2020

Winners of the Annual EdgeX Foundry Community Awards

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

Written by Aaron Williams, LF Edge Developer Advocate

Traditionally, at our Spring Face to Face meeting, LF Edge’s EdgeX Foundry honors members of the community who have helped us over the last year.  Well, there is nothing traditional about 2020.  Our Face to Face, scheduled for the end of April in Limerick, Ireland became a virtual event.  Thus, like most of the world, we switched from meeting in person to having Zoom meetings at home, while trying to balance getting work done, keeping up with our kids schooling, and doing all of the other things of our lives without leaving the house. While the meeting was different, we stuck to tradition and honored our 3rd Annual EdgeX Awards  at a ceremony yesterday with EdgeX Foundry TSC Co-chairs Keith Steele and Jim White.

From top left to right: Keith Steele, Maemalynn Meanor, Bryon Nevis. Michael Estrin, Lisa Rashidi-Ranjbar, James Gregg, Aaron Williams, Jim White

Congratulations to our winners Michael Estrin, James Gregg, Lisa Rashidi-Ranjbar and Bryon Nevis! Learn more about the awards and their dedication below.

Innovation Awards: The Innovation Award recognizes individuals who have contributed (contributing back to open source) the most innovative solution to the open source EdgeX Foundry project over the past year.

Winners: Michael Estrin and James Gregg

Michael was nominated for his bootstrap code effort that reduced the duplication and maintenance efforts by using dependency injection.  He was also one of the main contributors of the V2 APIs. Not only did he tirelessly work on the code, but he also had one-on-one meetings with members of the community to get their buy in and made sure that security was always planned from the beginning

“My involvement with EdgeX Foundry was driven by my employer — Dell Technologies.  Dell provided the opportunity to fully immerse myself in the open source project — as a committer, the current System Management Working Group Chair, and a member of the project’s Technical Steering Committee.  I’ve enjoyed working on EdgeX and I appreciate the project’s public recognition of my contributions over the past year.” – Michael Estrin

Michael Estrin, Dell Technologies, Winner of the EdgeX Innovation Award

James was nominated for his leadership of the EdgeX DevOps community and worked tirelessly to improve our CI/CD pipes, stabilize our development and testing environments, and greatly improve our release processes and procedures.  He and his team added in Snyk integration, Nexus Cleanup, the introduction of GitHub Org Plugin, and basically improving all parts of our support tools.

“Thank you to the EdgeX Foundry open source community for the Innovation award.  I’m truly honored to receive it and congratulate the other recipients that won EdgeX Foundry awards in 2020. I would also like to recognize the talented Intel DevOps team that worked to transform the build automation and who all worked many hours to make it such a success.  Thanks to Ernesto Ojeda, Lisa Ranjbar, Emilio Reyes, and Bill Mahoney for their dedication and commitment.  My involvement has been largely in support of the Open Retail Initiative where Intel along with other top technology companies collaborate on open source initiatives that will accelerate iteration, flexibility and innovation at scale. This project exposes the contributors to many subject areas (IoT, microservice development, security) so there’s always an opportunity to participate in an area of interest.  Working within the EdgeX Foundry project is very rewarding and I’d encourage others to participate even if it’s the smallest contribution.” – James Gregg

James Gregg, Intel, Winner of the EdgeX Innovation Award

Contribution Awards: The Contribution Award recognizes individuals who have contributed leadership and helped EdgeX Foundry advance and continue momentum in the past year. This includes individuals who have led work groups, special projects, and/or contributed large amounts of code, bug fixes, marketing material, documentation, or otherwise significantly advanced the efforts of EdgeX with their drive and leadership.

Winners:  Lisa Rashidi-Ranjbar and Bryon Nevis

Lisa was nominated for her work on improving EdgeX Foundry’s build process.  She transformed it so that today the build process uses modern Jenkins Pipelines.  This and the other build performance and optimizations greatly reduced the time to market for all of EdgeX’s microservices. This is the dev ops backbone that allows for continuous delivery and automated release of the EdgeX artifacts.  Plus, she worked with the developer training team to improve EdgeX’s formal education project.

“EdgeX Foundry is the first open source community I’ve been involved with and it’s been an awesome experience. The community is really active and welcomes contributions of all kinds to the project. My contributions are around transforming the continuous integration infrastructure and automating the release process. My motivation is to make the development of the project go more smoothly. I’ve always felt welcome and appreciated in the EdgeX community. That feeling of appreciation really goes a long way when you are solving software problems.” – Lisa Rashidi-Ranjbar

Lisa Rashidi-Ranjbar, Intel, Winner of the EdgeX Contribution Award

Bryon lent his extensive security experience and knowledge to EdgeX and vastly improved our security infrastructure.  Namely he developed a V2 API security implementation, which will be released in later releases and fixed many security issues.  The V2 API used an Issue Management Standard in which he worked with the community to make this a formal process and guidance.  Simply, EdgeX Foundry is much more security than it was before he started working for the community and because of his hard work and leadership in developing the processes, EdgeX’s security will continue to improve.

“I am a security architect and developer and have been involved with the EdgeX Security Working Group since Fall of 2018. Security touches everything.  Raising the IoT security bar is an industry-wide challenge that touches all parts of the hardware and software stack.  Adding security to an in-flight project such as EdgeX—without breaking anything—is especially hard and requires a sustained effort of small changes over a long period of time.  For me, the work transcends EdgeX: it is my opportunity to teach my fellow tradesmen (and tradeswomen) by example how to do security.” – Bryon Nevis

Byron Nevis, Intel, Winner of the EdgeX Contribution Award

Michael, James, Lisa, and Bryon join our previous winners:  Andy Foster, Drasko Draskovic, Micael Johanson, Lenny Goodell, Tony Espy, Trevor Conn, and Cloud Tsai, in earning the heartfelt gratitude of the community.  EdgeX Foundry has had more than 100 contributors from dozens of companies working for our community.  This work has enabled EdgeX to continue to grow. In fact, EdgeX Foundry passed the 1 million total downloads in October 2019, and just 5 months later we have more than 6 million.

To learn more about EdgeX Foundry, visit our website or join our Slack to ask questions and engage with community members. If you are not already a member of our community, it is really easy to join.  Simply visit our wiki page and/or check out our Git Hub and help us get to the next 6 million and more downloads!

 

 

 

 

May 14, 2020

Exploration and Practices of Edge Computing

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry, Industry Article

Written by Gavin Lu, LF Edge member, EdgeX Foundry China Project Lead and R&D Director in the VMware Office of the CTO

Exploration and Practices of Edge Computing 

Chapter 1:

Cloud computing and edge computing

After nearly ten years of rapid growth, cloud computing has become a widely accepted and widely used centralized computing method in various industries around the world. In recent years, with the rise of “new infrastructure construction” such as big data, artificial intelligence, 5G and Industrial Internet, the demand for edge computing has soared. No matter from the perspective of telecom carriers, public cloud service providers, or enterprise users in various industries, they hope to create an edge computing solution that is most suitable for their scenario in some form.

Cloud edge collaboration

Whether it is Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), Cloud Edge, or factory-side Device Edge, users want to be able to have an edge computing platform that cooperates with the cloud platform. Cloud edge collaboration is not only about opening up the data channel at run-time, but also the overall collaboration from the perspective of the entire life cycle management and the full-stack technology. In addition to the highly fragmented edge computing field of various industry platforms, it is undoubtedly more challenging to get through full-stack integration with multiple cloud computing platforms.

The dilemma of edge computing

At the bottom of the edge computing platform is the part about infrastructure, or device management. Due to the natural characteristics of the edge computing model, available device resources usually have considerable constrains. Whether it is from hardware specifications such as CPU, memory, storage, network, accelerator, or from OS, application framework and other software specifications, they are far from comparable to cloud computing platforms or even ordinary PCs. On the other hand, edge applications running on devices often have very different requirements for CPU and OS due to historical reasons and vendor heterogeneity. No matter from the cost of space, time, capital and other aspects, it adds more pressure.

Containerization and virtualization

In order to achieve cloud-edge collaboration, solve the problems of device management and edge application management, the most common practice in various industries now is to run containerized applications on devices and managed by cloud platforms. Its advantage is to make full use of the proven technology, platform, personnel and skills in cloud computing. The disadvantage is that it is more suitable for modern edge applications, and it is more difficult to implement containerization for legacy systems with different OSes. The representative of containerization is the EdgeX Foundry edge computing framework hosted under the LF Edge umbrella.



For legacy systems with different OSes, the realistic way is to package the application in a virtual machine and run it on the hypervisor platform on the device side. Virtualization platforms for edge applications may be further integrated with containerized platforms to create an unified operating mechanism across OSes. For example, the ACRN project under the Linux Foundation, and the EVE project under LF Edge are virtualization platforms specifically for devices.

Edge computing operation and monitoring

Whether it is containerization, virtualization or a combination of the two, the practice of operating edge computing will eventually and only be done on the cloud side. Otherwise, for large-scale production deployment, the accumulation of efficiency, safety, cost and other issues will become an inevitable nightmare. So from the perspective of operation and management, although these devices are not necessarily located on the cloud side, because they are all managed from the cloud side, they are operated and maintained in a manner similar to cloud computing. Device Cloud in the sense.
As an industry leader with vast experience and knowledge, Gavin has been writing a series of articles focused on edge computing. These articles are posted on his personal blog and are posted here with his permission. To read more content from Gavin, visit his website. 
May 8, 2020

Turning your Raspberry Pi 4 into an edge gateway – Part 2

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

Written by Galem Kayo, EdgeX Foundry contributor and Product Manager for Ubuntu Core at Canonical, an LF Edge member company

This content original ran on the ubuntu blog. For more content like this, please visit their website. 

In the first part of this tutorial, we installed and configured EdgeX foundry on a Raspberry Pi 4, turning it into an edge gateway. In this tutorial, the gateway will be connected to dummy IoT devices. These dummy devices will be virtually simulated by software. They will send messages transmitting random measurements to an MQTT broker hosted in the cloud. These messages will be forwarded to MQTT clients that subscribes to receive them.

Connecting the Southbound

The IoT data flow from devices to the edge gateway is referred to as the Southbound. In EdgeX, communication between IoT devices and gateways is assured by device services. A device service is a microservice that implements an interface to an IoT communication protocol (Modbus, OPC-UA, REST, BLT, Zigbee, MQTT, BACNet, SNMP etc…).

The Virtual Device Service is convenient for configuring and testing  your Raspberry Pi 4 gateway. It allows you to carry out tests without any real IoT device. This way, microservices running on the gateway can be configured and troubleshooted without any IoT device connected. The Virtual Device Service also simulates dummy IoT devices that generate and transmit random numbers of different types: integer, unsigned integer, boolean and float.

The Virtual Device Service can be enabled very easily with the following command:

sudo snap set edgexfoundry device-virtual=on

Upon enablement, the service and the virtual devices it simulates become visible in the edgeX web UI.

Creating an MQTT server in the cloud

Edge gateways are the juncture between devices and servers. We will now configure the receiving end in the cloud: a server hosting a custom MQTT broker. The MQTT broker will receive the messages sent from the virtual devices. The messages will then be dispatched to subscribing client devices.

The MQTT broker is installed on a Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic) server instance running AWS cloud. MQTT is quite easily installed on the Ubuntu cloud instance in a snap, as follows:

sudo snap install mosquitto

The status of the broker can then be inquired:

sudo systemctl status snap.mosquitto.mosquitto.service

Connecting the Northbound

With the MQTT server hosted in the cloud, a Northbound connection needs to be established between the Raspberry Pi 4 gateway and the server. An EdgeX Export Service is a microservice that moves data collected by device services to a server in the cloud. An Export Service can be created as follows:

sudo snap set edgexfoundry export-client=on
sudo snap set edgexfoundry export-distro=on

Upon activation, data transfer to the MQTT server can be configured. Parameters like the server IP address, port, communication protocol, data format, topic and encryption are to be specified as described in the screenshot below.

Once saved, the Export Service will connect to the MQTT broker and create a topic. The Export Service will publish data collected from virtual devices through this topic.

Consuming the virtual IoT data flow

At this point, you have a Raspberry Pi 4 gateway listening to virtual IoT devices, and forwarding the data collected from devices to an MQTT server hosted on a public cloud.

Now, any MQTT client running on any device can consume the IoT data flow originating from virtual devices. Clients only need to subscribe to the associated topic via our MQTT broker.

To read this data flow, we will install an MQTT client on a Ubuntu desktop, and subscribe to the topic created above via the Export Service. It should be noted that this data flow can be accessed via any MQTT client software installed on any desktop device.

sudo snap install mosquitto
mosquitto_sub -h <your_ip_adress_here> -t <topic_name_here>

The virtual IoT data flow can be read in the terminal. The stream corresponds to the data created by the Virtual Devices, in the format specified by our Export Service.

Resources

Next steps

In the third part of this tutorial, the gateway will be connected to a physical IoT device. We will also test the device management capabilities of EdgeX Foundry.

May 5, 2020

LF Edge Expands Ecosystem with Open Horizon, adds Seven New Members and Reaches Critical Deployment Milestones

By Akraino Edge Stack, Announcement, Baetyl, EdgeX Foundry, Fledge, Home Edge, LF Edge, Open Horizon, Project EVE, State of the Edge

  • Open Horizon, an application and metadata delivery platform, is now part of LF Edge as a Stage 1 (At-Large) Project.
  • New members bring R&D expertise in Telco, Enterprise and Cloud Edge Infrastructure.
  • EdgeX Foundry hits 4.3 million downloads and Akraino R2 delivers 14 validated deployment-ready blueprints.
  • Fledge shares a race car use case optimizing car and driver operations using Google Cloud, Machine Learning and state-of-the-art digital twins and simulators.

SAN FRANCISCO – April 30, 2020 –  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 project momentum with the addition a new project and several technical milestones for EdgeX Foundry, Akraino Edge Stack and Fledge. Additionally, the project welcomes seven new members including CloudBrink, Federated Wireless, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Kaloom, Ori Industries, Tensor Networks and VoerEir to its ecosystem.

Open Horizon, an existing project contributed by IBM, is a platform for managing the service software lifecycle of containerized workloads and related machine learning assets. It enables autonomous management of applications deployed to distributed webscale fleets of edge computing nodes and devices without requiring on-premise administrators.

Edge computing brings computation and data storage closer to where data is created by people, places, and things. Open Horizon simplifies the job of getting the right applications and machine learning onto the right compute devices, and keeps those applications running and updated. It also enables the autonomous management of more than 10,000 edge devices simultaneously – that’s 20 times as many endpoints as in traditional solutions.

“We are thrilled to welcome Open Horizon and new members to the LF Edge ecosystem,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge & IoT, the Linux Foundation. “These additions complement our deployment ready LF Edge open source projects and our growing global ecosystem.”

“LF Edge is bringing together some of the most significant open source efforts in the industry, said Todd Moore, IBM VP Open Technology, “We are excited to contribute the Open Horizon project as this will expand the work with the other projects and companies to create shared approaches, open standards, and common interfaces and APIs.”

Open Horizon joins LF Edge’s other projects including: Akraino Edge Stack, Baetyl,  EdgeX Foundry, Fledge, Home Edge, Project EVE and State of the Edge. These projects support emerging edge applications across areas such as non-traditional video and connected things that require lower latency, and  faster processing and mobility. By forming a software stack that brings the best of cloud, enterprise and telecom, LF Edge helps to unify a fragmented edge market around a common, open vision for the future of the industry.

Since its launch last year, LF Edge projects have met significant milestones including:

  • EdgeX Foundry has hit 4.3 million docker downloads.
  • Akraino Edge Stack (Release 2) has 14 specific Blueprints that have all tested and validated on hardware labs and can be deployed immediately in various industries including Connected Vehicle, AR/VR, Integrated Cloud Native NFV, Network Cloud and Tungsten Fabric and SDN-Enabled Broadband Access.
  • Fledge shares a race car use case optimizing car and driver operations using Google Cloud, Machine Learning and state-of-the-art digital twins and simulators.
  • State of the Edge merged under LF Edge earlier this month and will continue to pave the path as the industry’s first open research program on edge computing. Under the umbrella, State of the Edge will continue its assets including State of the Edge Reports, Open Glossary of Edge Computing and the Edge Computing Landscape.

Support from the Expanding LF Edge Ecosystem

Federated Wireless:

“LF Edge has become a critical point of collaboration for network and enterprise edge innovators in this new cloud-driven IT landscape,” said Kurt Schaubach, CTO, Federated Wireless. “We joined the LF Edge to apply our connectivity and spectrum expertise to helping define the State of the Edge, and are energized by the opportunity to contribute to the establishment of next generation edge compute for the myriad of low latency applications that will soon be part of private 5G networks.”

Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI):

“ITRI is one of the world’s leading technology R&D institutions aiming to innovate a better future for society. Founded in 1973, ITRI has played a vital role in transforming Taiwan’s industries from labor-intensive into innovation-driven. We focus on the fields of Smart Living, Quality Health, and Sustainable Environment. Over the years, we also added a focus on 5G, AI, and Edge Computing related research and development. We joined LF Edge to leverage its leadership in these areas and to collaborate with the more than 75 member companies on projects like Akraino Edge Stack.”

Kaloom:

“Kaloom is pleased to join LF Edge to collaborate with the community on developing open, cloud-native networking, management and orchestration for edge deployments” said Suresh Krishnan, chief technology officer, Kaloom.  “We are working on an unified edge solution in order to optimize the use of resources while meeting the exacting performance, space and energy efficiency needs that are posed by edge deployments. We look forward to contributing our expertise in this space and to collaborating with the other members in LF Edge in accelerating the adoption of open source software, hardware and standards that speed up innovation and reduce TCO.”

Ori Industries:

“At Ori, we are fundamentally changing how software interacts with the distributed hardware on mobile operator networks.” said Mahdi Yahya, Founder and CEO, Ori Industries. “We also know that developers can’t provision, deploy and run applications seamlessly on telco infrastructure. We’re looking forward to working closely with the LF Edge community and the wider open-source ecosystem this year, as we turn our attention to developers and opening up access to the distributed, telco edge.”

Tensor Networks:

“Tensor Networks believes in and supports open source. Having an arena free from the risks of IP Infringement to collaborate and develop value which can be accessible to more people and organizations is essential to our efforts. Tensor runs its organization, and develops products on top of Linux.  The visions of LF Edge, where networks and latency are part of open software based service composition and delivery, align with our vision of open, fast, smart, secure, connected, and customer driven opportunities across all industry boundaries.” – Bill Walker, Chief Technology Officer.

VoerEir:

“In our extensive work with industry leaders for NFVI/VIM test and benchmarking,  a need to standardize infrastructure KPIs in Edge computing has gradually become more important,” said Arif  Khan, Co-Founder of VoerEir AB. “This need has made it essential for us to join LF Edge and to initiate the new Feature Project “Kontour” under the Akraino umbrella. We are excited to collaborate with various industry leaders to define, standardize  and measure Edge KPIs.”

About The Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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April 30, 2020

EdgeX Foundry China Project Q1 Recap

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

Written by Gavin Lu, LF Edge member, EdgeX Foundry China Project Lead and R&D Director in the VMware Office of the CTO

The EdgeX Foundry China Project launched in December 2019 with an active community in China that leveraged as many resources provided by LF Edge and EdgeX Foundry global community at possible. We’re happy to report that the first quarter has been a success.

All of our content is curated on the China Project wiki site.  Three monthly meetings were conducted on Jan 10, Feb 14 and Mar 6, where core contributors from VMware, Intel, Thundersoft, CertusNet, EMQ, IoTech and other active companies discuss the project, activities and outreach.

Webinars of technical talks

One of our focuses is to raise awareness for EdgeX Foundry in China and encourage developers to get more familiar with the EdgeX framework, unblock obstacles and boost their interest to contribute to the innovation of the community. We planned a hackathon and hosted a tight series of weekly webinars to introduce EdgeX Foundry components and code level analysis. We hosted six sessions led by VMware, Thundersoft,  IoTech and Intel with more than 500 developers attending these sessions.

Direct code contributions

The first result of our Virtual Sandbox came out in Q1. EMQ published an OSS project Kuiper for rule engine in edge & IoT area in last winter, and they had a strong interest to contribute to EdgeX Foundry community. China Project built the connection of EMQ with the proper technical leaders in EdgeX Foundry global community, and hosted the initial round of technical discussion meetings. Right now it’s agreed to include Kuiper container in EdgeX Docker Compose file, targeting to have that integration for Geneva release in Apr 2020. EMQ has biweekly meetings setup with EdgeX App WG to ensure that happen. This is the second major contribution from China to EdgeX community after UI by VMware, which we recently also added more resources to upgrade in the Geneva release next month.

We expect, encourage and support more direct substantial contributions coming later.

Evangelism

This quarter, we had Chinese Spring Festival break annually, and the recent coronavirus outburst also made a sudden and strong impact. While mostly working from home for better safety, members of China Project are still trying to make some progress to promote EdgeX Foundry. For examples,

  • Intel, Dell and VMware are leading EdgeX Foundry Hackathon plan in China, adapting the schedule accordingly.
  • Thundersoft is planning to co-organize an AI & IoT Innovation Contest with other hosts, and hold a webinar on EdgeX for developers.
  • Wayclouds is collaborating with Opple on smart lighting using EdgeX platform, targeting in mid of Apr.

As a common seen approach, we setup an official WeChat ID ”EdgeXFoundryCN” (“EdgeXFoundry社区” in Chinese), which will help us promote EdgeX Foundry as an independent communication channel. After just 10 days and three posts, the followers of this ID increased to around 150. We will leverage this WeChat ID as well as all existing EdgeX Foundry WeChat groups and Linux Foundation WeChat group, and other WeChat IDs operated by community members.

We understand that this is an extraordinary time, and we are adjusting to the rapidly evolving situation. In the meanwhile, we also try best to remain focused on supporting the community and delivering our commitments. Let’s work together and make it happen!

For more information, stay tuned to the EdgeX Foundry China Project Wiki: https://wiki.edgexfoundry.org/display/FA/China+Project.

April 23, 2020
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