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LF Edge Member Spotlight: Section

By Blog, Member Spotlight, State of the Edge

The LF Edge community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that represent the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source edge solutions. Today, we sat down with Molly Wojcik, Director of Education & Awareness for Section, to discuss the importance of open source, their drive to standardize and accelerate the edge, how they contribute to the State of the Edge project and the impact of being a member of the LF Edge community.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

Section is all about empowering developers to be the heroes in edge computing innovation by giving them control and flexibility to run any workload along the edge continuum to meet the specific needs of their application. Users can deploy their own custom workloads (containers/serverless) or leverage best-of-breed software available in Section’s edge module marketplace. Solutions include web application firewalls (WAFs), bot management, image optimization, A/B & multivariate testing, virtual waiting room, and many more.

Section was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2012. Headquarters are now in Colorado, and the Section team spans across the U.S., Australia, and Europe. Section has been recognized by industry analysts and peers as a leader in the edge compute landscape and is backed by a group of top-shelf venture capital firms, led by The Foundry Group. 

Our platform significantly reduces cost and complexity for web engineers seeking to capitalize on the benefits of the edge for their application. Docker-powered and Kubernetes-orchestrated, the Section platform optimizes edge workload distribution, scalability, traffic routing, diagnostics, and more, to allow engineers to focus on their core application functionality while meeting performance, security, and scalability goals.

Why is your organization adopting an open source approach?

From day one, we have stuck by three guiding principles: open, control, and easy. We believe the framework we provide (and the edge) should be open. Engineers should have tangible control over that edge, and we should make it easy for them to use.

The key challenges of the edge are industry-wide and user-specific. Developing a truly successful edge fabric to meet the needs of tomorrow’s Internet will be dependent on certain levels of cooperation and standardization. The closed networks of proprietary software, such as legacy CDNs, which served the Internet from 2000 until today, aren’t capable of solving the hundreds of thousands of edge locations and truly custom workloads that engineers will need to run in those locations. Work underway by collaborative open standards bodies, such as LF Edge, the Open Networking Foundation and Multi-access Edge Computing are meeting this challenge head-on to build a truly successful edge fabric.

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

In line with our drive to standardize and accelerate the edge, we were excited to join LF Edge and become part of this community-forged movement, working to move edge computing forward and build an open-source software stack. We believe that LF Edge will play a similar pivotal role in advancing the edge computing ecosystem as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has done in advancing the microservices ecosystem.

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

One of the top benefits for us is the opportunity to participate in a community alongside other vendors, developers, OEMs and infrastructure providers, working together to develop a common set of standards and achieve wider interoperability. At this point in the evolution of edge computing, we still struggle with shared definitions, and LF Edge has been working tirelessly since its start to create an open and standard framework for the technology, which industry leaders can coalesce around.

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

The edge ecosystem is extremely diverse, and where some may specialize in IoT or the device/user edge, our focus tends to lean more heavily on the infrastructure/service provider edge. Lending our experience and perspective alongside contributions from the larger LF Edge community helps bridge gaps to provide a more comprehensive understanding of edge challenges and solutions.

On a more personal level, I have recently taken on the role of Chair of the State of the Edge Landscape Working Group. The LF Edge Interactive Landscape uses the CNCF’s Interactive Landscape as a guide and framework, intending for it to play a similar role in the edge community as a go-to resource. The interactive map categorizes LF Edge projects, in addition to edge-related organizations and technologies, to offer a comprehensive overview of the edge ecosystem. It is dynamically generated from data maintained in a community-supported GitHub account.

I’ve been involved as an active contributor and facilitator within the Landscape working group since its beginnings with LF Edge in early 2019. With a better together approach, I believe that building community is fundamental to advancing the edge ecosystem, so becoming Chair of the Edge Landscape Working Groups represents an ideal opportunity to play a central part in building this important shared resource.

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

The fact that LF Edge is an umbrella organization independent of hardware, silicon, cloud or OS, not working to build leads, but rather to align and educate, is refreshing. Its neutrality allows many diverse community members to participate in its mission, from enterprise to journalists to non-profits. This in turn is enabling LF Edge to ask the big questions and be unafraid to explore how edge computing will transform the Internet.

How will  LF Edge help your business?

Section aims to provide unmatched flexibility for developers to customize, deploy, and optimize workloads for their unique application architecture. We want to empower developers to be able to choose their software, the number of endpoints, and where the application edge should live. We were the first within the edge platform space to offer full integration with agile development workflows. We thrive on being part of LF Edge, helping build awareness of developer and engineer needs at the edge. LF Edge represents the opportunity for us to help build a shared vocabulary and vision for edge computing, that equally works towards our mission of empowering application engineers to run any workload, anywhere. 

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

As with any community, you only get out what you put it. If you’re looking to broaden and deepen your connections, knowledge, and contributions to really drive edge computing forward, LF Edge provides a lot of different opportunities to give and get.

To find out more about our members or how to join LF Edge, click here. To learn more about the Edge Computing Landscape, click here.

Additionally, if you have questions or comments, visit the  LF Edge Slack Channel and share your thoughts in the #community or #stateoftheedge-landscape channels. 

 

June 30, 2020

LF Edge Member Spotlight: Arm

By Akraino Edge Stack, Blog, Member Spotlight

The LF Edge community comprises a diverse set of member companies and people that represent the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source edge solutions. Today, we sat down with Tina Tsou, Enterprise Architect at Arm and Co-Chair of the Technical Steering Committee for the Akraino Edge Stack, to discuss the importance of open source software, collaborating with industry leaders in edge computing, security, how they contribute to the Akraino Edge Stack project and the impact of being a part of the LF Edge ecosystem.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

I work for Arm, a semiconductor IP company, as Enterprise Architect in the Infrastructure line of business. 

What are your interests in open source projects?

The open source approach allows me to get requirements from customers, understand the solutions from partners, so I can get prepared well for internal design and products, having open source in mind.

What are your thoughts on LF Edge and what sort of impact do you think LF Edge has on the edge, networking, and IoT industries?

I joined the Akraino Edge Stack per a customer’s ask and then the project was merged under the LF Edge umbrella. LF Edge is the de facto standard for the mainstream product and deployment of edge computing including edge servers, network edge, and device gateway.

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

The top benefits include having direct connection with customers that keep me updated on the latest trends of edge computing and collaboration among end to end ecosystems and supply chain as well as validation in CI/CD environments.

What are your top contributions as a community member?

I serve as LF Edge TAC member, Akraino TSC co-chair, contributed Integrated Edge Cloud (IEC) platform (Arm enabler) used by multiple blueprints like the 5G MEC System, the AI Edge, etc.  Sample blueprints that I’ve contributed to include:

  1. The purpose of Public Cloud Edge Interface (PCEI) Blueprint family is to specify a set of open APIs for enabling interworking between multiple functional entities or Domains that provide services needed for implementation of Edge capabilities/applications that require close integration between the Mobile Edge, the Public Cloud Core and Edge as well as the 3rd-Party provided Edge functions. In Release 3 we choose to expose the set of location APIs as defined by the MTSI MEC to showcase the PCEI capability.
  2. KubeEdge Edge Service Blueprint showcases end-to-end solution for edge services with KubeEdge centered edge stack. The first release will focus on the ML inference offloading use case. It supports multi-arch.
  3. The Radio Edge Cloud Blueprint is a member of the Telco Appliance blueprint family which is designed to provide a fully integration tested appliance tuned to meet the requirements of the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC). Changes since Release 2 (2019-11-18), include New Features like Arm64 Support! – REC Release 3 supports Arm based CPUs for the first time. Support includes Ampere Hawk and Falcon servers.
  4. IEC (Integrated Edge Cloud) is a platform that enables new functionalities and business models on the network edge.
  5. The IEC type 2 mainly focuses on the high-performance computing system of medium and/or large deployment at the data center.
  6. IEC Type 3 mainly focuses on Android Application running on edge Arm Cloud architecture with GPU/ vGPU Management.

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

LF Edge has a pragmatic approach for Practice, Project, Production in a closed loop, which is at production quality and deployable.

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

Start by questioning how you expect LF Edge will be used in your business and then read the end user stories. You will find the right project and perspective that you care about and then take baby steps, for example, try an Akraino blueprint you are interested in, and report any issue you find. The community always has your back. Have fun!

Members of the Akraino TSC at the March 2020 F2F

To learn more about Akraino Edge Stack, click here. To find out more about our members or how to join LF Edge, click here. Additionally, if you have questions or comments, visit the  LF Edge Slack Channel and share your thoughts in the #community or #akraino-tsc channels.

May 30, 2020

LF Edge Member Spotlight: Altran

By Akraino Edge Stack, Blog, LF Edge, Member Spotlight

The LF Edge community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that represent the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source edge solutions. Today, we sat down with Shamik Mishra, Vice President, Research and Innovation of Altran, to discuss the importance of open source software, collaborating with industry leaders in edge computing, security, how they contribute to the Akraino Edge Stack project and the impact of being a part of the LF Edge ecosystem.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

Altran is a world leader in engineering and R&D services. The Group offers a unique value proposition that helps customers meet their transformation and innovation challenges. Altran supports its customers, from concept to industrialization, to develop the products and services of tomorrow. Altran has been working for more than 35 years with major players in many sectors: Automotive, Aeronautics, Space, Defense & Naval, Rail, Infrastructure & Transport, Industry & Consumer Products, Life Sciences, Communications, Semiconductor & Electronics, Software & Internet, Finance & Public Sector. In 2019, Capgemini, and Altran announced a merger project in the context of a friendly tender offer to create a global leader in Intelligent Industry. Altran generated 3.2 billion in revenue in 2019, with more than 50,000 employees in more than 30 countries.

Why is your organization adopting an open source approach?

Open Source Software has revolutionized the technology industry globally in more ways than one. It has significantly shortened software/product development cycles, spurred innovation and boosted entrepreneurship. Licenses come free of cost, with the expenses typically being for deploying, hardening, supporting, customizing, and maintaining the software. Businesses have the flexibility of choosing and customizing the best solutions for their needs. At Altran, we help our clients lead into the future by solving their most complex engineering and R&D problems through specialized solutions. We see open source software as an opportunity to differentiate our offerings by accelerating development of such solutions for our clients. This provides them the required flexibility of choice and a way to optimize costs for creating value towards their clients.

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

Altran envisioned the significant role and impact of Edge Computing early in its evolution cycle. However, one of the key challenges is that different organizations in the industry perceive Edge Computing differently based on the nature of their business or pursuit. LF Edge is an umbrella organization that is agnostic of hardware, silicon, cloud and OS. This helps the industry leaders arrive at a common understanding of Edge Computing and create an open and standard framework for the technology. We believe LF Edge can decisively reduce the semantic dissonance on Edge Computing in the industry and help businesses work together to accelerate innovation.

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

 LF Edge community has industry leading organizations as members who specialize in large-scale hardware manufacturing (chip, mobile devices, network equipment etc.), software product development, operating systems, engineering services, telecom services, cloud solutions and more. This diversity helps set a broad framework for Edge Computing by considering various concerns and scenarios relevant to the member domains. Since the framework will be open source, it strengthens its credibility and will likely be adopted widely in the industry. Altran being a world leader in engineering and R&D services, believes the LF Edge forum presents a unique opportunity to engage with the community and contribute to the open source Edge Computing framework. Based on our early start in this space, the exposure to experts on the LF Edge forum helps us to benefit from the views and propositions of diverse organizations to validate and strengthen our service offerings and competencies in Edge Computing.

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

Altran aims to play a leading role in the Edge Computing ecosystem by contributing some of its software and solution breakthroughs to the open community, including (but not limited to) contributions to compute frameworks, APIs, management plane and use cases. Altran is currently actively pursuing the Akraino project particularly on security aspects. Other interest areas are device edge and intelligent application development leveraging the LF edge projects.

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

Three key features set LF Edge apart from other industry alliances and are likely to make it successful: 1. The diversity of members. The community has members ranging across multiple domains such as Chip, Mobile, Network Equipment Manufacturing, software product development, telecom service providers, cloud service providers, engineering service providers etc. The diversity is also geographical. It includes organizations that are across various geos, thereby helping to absorb wide range of views and concerns for the community. With so much diversity the framework is inclined to remain neutral and is unlikely to be driven by the interests of a few members in the community. 2. The timing of the alliance Edge Compute, in its evolution, is currently at a point, where it is possible for the industry to come together and define a framework and standards that can be eventually adopted by various players and can be evolved and customized. Unlike other alliances, the timing of this alliance helps it to be more successful. 3. The framework is open source and the projects onboarded are also open source. This makes it easy to accelerate the innovation in this space. The community also draws strength from the support of Linux Foundation.

How will  LF Edge help your business?

Altran’s vision for Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is to create a developer-centric architecture and cloud-native platform that will make Edge discovery, onboarding and management of applications easy and seamless for Edge application developers. The Altran Ensconce platform brings together multiple capabilities, accelerators and frameworks that enables rapid development of Multi-Access Edge Compute (MEC) solutions. Being part of LF Edge, we see an opportunity to further evolve our MEC solutions, working with the LF Edge alliance on the open source framework for Edge Computing. We believe that our clients can benefit from this approach by quick adoption of our solutions and be ahead in their businesses. We also believe that there is a unique opportunity for us to contribute to the community from our experience.

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

LF Edge is a great opportunity for various organizations in the industry that are interested in collaborating with other industry leaders to drive innovation in Edge Computing and mutually benefit from the ecosystem. Organizations can shape the future of Edge Computing by joining this alliance early in the innovation cycle.

To learn more about Akraino Edge Stack, click here. To find out more about our members or how to join LF Edge, click here. Additionally, if you have questions or comments, visit the  LF Edge Slack Channel and share your thoughts in the #community or #akraino-tsc channels.

April 21, 2020

LF Edge Member Spotlight: Vapor IO

By Blog, Member Spotlight, Open Glossary of Edge Computing

The LF Edge community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that represent the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source edge solutions. Today, we sat down with Matt Trifiro, CMO of Vapor IO and Open Glossary of Edge Computing TSC Chair, to discuss the importance of open source, the “Third Act of the Internet,” how they contribute to the Open Glossary project and the impact of being a member of the LF Edge community.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

Vapor IO builds and deploys data center and networking infrastructure to support edge computing and 5G. Our main product is the Kinetic Edge, which is a nationwide platform for edge colocation, edge networking and edge traffic exchange. We deploy our facilities on the infrastructure edge, in close proximity to the last mile networks. Our customers are the large cloud providers, CDNs, web-scale companies, streaming game providers, and other organizations building low-latency applications. We are Austin-based, but distributed all over the US. Our Kinetic Edge platform is live in four cities (Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and Pittsburgh) and we have 16 additional US cities under construction. We expect to deploy the Kinetic Edge to the top 36 US metro areas by the end of 2021, giving us a reach that exceeds 75 percent of the US population.

Why is your organization adopting an open source approach?

Open source allows a community, often one comprised of competitors, to pool their resources and build a common platform upon which differentiated businesses can be built. By collaborating on shared projects, we collectively accelerate entire markets. This lets companies focus on their unique strengths while not wasting effort competing on common building blocks. Everybody wins. We currently lead two active open source projects:

  • Open Glossary of Edge Computing (an LF Edge project), a Wikipedia-style community-driven glossary of terms relevant to edge computing.
  • Synse, a simple, scalable API for sensing and controlling data center equipment.

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

We believe edge computing will create a massive restructuring of the Internet, what State of the Edge 2020 report calls the “Third Act of the Internet.” We joined LF Edge to help accelerate the rearchitecture of the Internet to support this Third Act. This transformation will impact the entire world and it will require many companies to collaborate on large, multi-decade initiatives. The Linux Foundation has a track record of good stewardship of open source communities and we felt LF Edge had the right mix of focus and neutrality to make it possible.

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

By being part of the LF Edge community, we get to help drive one of the most fundamental Internet transformations of our lifetime, something that will impact the entire world. LF Edge brings together diverse viewpoints and ensures projects advance based on their merit—and not the power or money behind the contributing companies. This creates a level playing field that advances the entire industry.

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

Our main contributions to LF Edge have been twofold:

  1. We chair the Open Glossary of Edge Computing, a founding LF Edge project. This project has been helping to shape the overall LF Edge narrative by creating a shared vocabulary that all LF Edge projects can align around.
  2. We are very active in the LF Edge community. Our CEO, Cole Crawford, is now serving his second term as a member of the LF Edge Governing Board.

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

Many industry alliances suffer from a “pay for play” approach, where those who pay the most get the most influence. The Linux Foundation has managed to navigate these waters deftly. They have successfully attracted deep-pocket funders while maintaining a level playing field and aggressively including smaller companies and individuals who help advance the projects in ways that don’t involve direct financial contributions. This gives the LF Edge a lot more “staying power,” as it truly serves the broad community and not just the goals of the largest companies. 

How will  LF Edge help your business?

The LF Edge community gives us access to the best technologies and thought leadership in edge computing. LF Edge helps us stay up to date on the industry and align our business with the community’s needs. By paying attention to what kinds of edge infrastructure LF Edge projects require, we are able to fine-tune our Kinetic Edge offering in a way that will support the next generation of edge native and edge enhanced applications.

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

If you’re looking for a place to start, pick a project in the LF Edge portfolio where you can make the most impact. Become a contributor and get to know the committers and technical leadership. LF projects are meritocracy based, so the more active you are and the more value you contributed, the more recognition and influence you will get within the community. This is one of the best ways to start.

To learn more about Open Glossary of Edge Computing, click here. To find out more about our members or how to join LF Edge, click here.

Additionally, if you have questions or comments, visit the  LF Edge Slack Channel and share your thoughts in the #community or #glossary channels.

March 24, 2020

LF Edge Member Spotlight: Netsia

By Akraino Edge Stack, Blog, LF Edge, Member Spotlight

The LF Edge community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that represent the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source edge solutions. Today, we sat down with Madhu Kashyap, Director of Product Management for Netsia, to discuss the importance of a open source, their infrastructure and need for communication at the edge, how they contribute to the Akraino Edge Stack project and the impact of being a member of the LF Edge community.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

Netsia develops fixed broadband and wireless solutions for the telecom industry. Netsia’s vision is to provide a shared infrastructure for fixed mobile convergence at the edge.  

Netsia’s SEBA (Software-Enabled Broadband Access) solution transforms the traditional Passive Optical Network (PON) used in fixed access networks (FTTx) through an open, programmable, cloud-native, vendor agnostic future-proof platform, that is based on Cloudification, Virtualization, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). It leverages network disaggregation, open source software and white box economies at the network edge.

Why is your organization adopting an open source approach?

Netsia is an active participant in open source communities and standards bodies and provides enriched telco-grade distributions of open source platforms in a continuous manner with long term support.

Communication Service Providers (CSPs), both fixed and mobile, are looking to transform their PoPs (Point of Presence) / Central Offices (COs) as edge clouds. The current architecture is rigid, closed, monolithic and purpose-built leading to high CAPEX and OPEX due to vendor lock-in. CSPs want to use virtualization, cloudification, SDN, NFV technologies by leveraging open source software and disaggregated white boxes.

Open source software helps Netsia to gather CSPs’ requirements and share the cost of development with the community. Netsia adds value by hardening and productizing open source.

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

Netsia is focused on the Edge. CSPs are looking to consolidate various access network technologies to a common management platform that includes SDN controller, orchestration, VIM etc.  while addressing the latency and bandwidth demands of 5G networks.

The LF Edge community provides the industry with a solid foundation for managing the edge with its development of blueprints across different domains and shaping the future of edge networking and IoT.

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

LF Edge provides a dedicated forum of like-minded organizations be it operators or vendors who believe in openness through design, architecture, APIs or code to drive  edge transformation. By participating in LF Edge, Netsia stands to gain from the collective innovation that drives the industry forward. With a community like this the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and organizations can benefit greatly from the different perspectives and ideas that are generated in the course of project planning, design and implementation. 

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

Netsia is actively involved in the Akraino project and the SEBA Blueprint.

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

 Being part of the LF umbrella opens many doors and adds significant heft to initiatives that are taken seriously by the industry. Harmonization with other open source communities and working with upstream projects LF Edge makes sure there is no duplication and overlap of effort.

How will  LF Edge help your business?

As LF Edge blueprints get adopted by industry it helps Netsia by differentiating itself in a highly competitive field. LF Edge provides the name recognition and brand that is recognized in the industry as innovating with cutting edge technology.

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

Netsia would definitely encourage and advocate for anyone considering LF Edge membership. The level of commitment by the community is unparalleled and provides high visibility to member organizations through events and other marketing activities.

To learn more about Akraino Edge Stack, click here. To find out more about our members or how to join LF Edge, click here.

Additionally, if you have questions or comments, visit the  LF Edge Slack Channel and share your thoughts in the #community or #akraino channels. 

February 25, 2020

LF Edge Member Spotlight: Dianomic

By Blog, Fledge, Member Spotlight

The LF Edge community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that represent the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source edge solutions. Today, we sat down with Tom Arthur, CEO at Dianomic, and one of the creators of Fledge, to discuss the importance of a growing ecosystem, their Industrial IoT framework, the impact LF Edge has made and what the future holds for the company.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

Our company name is Dianomic Systems.  It is derived from the Greek word dianomi meaning distribution.  As you may have guessed, edge computing is a challenging distributed computing problem.

The fragmentation and distribution of industrial data, networking, processing, security and storage makes managing it complicated.  Simplifying industrial IoT application and system development with a ubiquitous open source stack, standards, and community is our mission.

With our community, we created FogLAMP in 2018 then contributed all the code to the LF Edge’s Project Fledge to help address the industrial data problem.  Fledge is a stack of integrated microservices that operate from sensor to cloud (the edge).  These services connect any sensor or machine data, aggregate data, buffer data, transform data, filter data, execute AI/ML operations, alert, visualize and forward data to any cloud or on-prem destination.

 

Why is your organization adopting an open source approach?

 The LAMP stack is largely responsible for the success of web application development.   Almost every web, ecommerce and social network developer consumed it.  Dianomic believes a similar open source stack is required for Operational Technology (OT) to help drive Industrial 4.0 application development.   This is the Fledge community’s mission.

We already have several public use cases and many not yet public proving the open source approach works.

At Jacksonville Energy Authority (JEA), they deployed Fledge to monitor substation transformer’s oil pumps, oil temperature, cooling fans, ambient air temperature and hydrogen gas.  They are now also testing infrared cameras to monitor heat other heat sources in the substation and in their water business monitoring pumps and bearings.   Using Fledge’s PHP based plugin architecture they developed a KAFKA north connection to be their single pub-sub system for all their IIoT data requirements.   The goal is complete predictive and conditional monitoring of all non-SCADA systems.  This KAFKA north service was then contributed to the Fledge stack for the community and supported by Dianomic.   Fledge is then tightly integrated with both their OSIsoft PI systems (that monitors SCADA and DCS systems) and their Oracle ERP and maintenance systems.

At General Atomics (a General Dynamics spin-out), the maker of the U.S. Airforce’s Predator drone, Fledge is used to help monitor the manufacturing quality of the fuselage, wings and stabilizers.   These components are made of composites where heat and humidity are tightly controlled.   Fledge is used with industrial grade explosion proof sensors to “green light” a process once appropriate temp and humidity levels are achieved.  Once again, using the plugin architecture, GA was able to tightly integrate the data and events with systems monitoring the rest of the factory keeping track of everything in context of the entire aircraft being built.   These integrations are also part of the Fledge stack today. 

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

There is no better organization to help govern, build communities and market the benefits of a Linux based OT equivalent of the LAMP stack.

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

Working hand-in-hand with the premier computing, data management and networking companies that share the same passion and vision for open source projects to fundamentally help industrial developers build better machines, plants, factories and businesses.

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

Dianomic, Google, OSIsoft, industrial system integrators and industrial companies have all contributed to Fledge.  The LF Edge’s project Fledge started when Dianomic contributed the entire FogLAMP stack in winter of 2019.    At that time, the code was in its 8th release and had been commercially deployed in energy, manufacturing and mining operations.  Today, Fledge has ~30,000 commits and averages ~5000 commits/month.

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

The Linux Foundation’s history of delivering commercial grade open source software combined with the list of LF Edge membership is simply the best.   Members are serious and passionate about quality open source software, building strong communities and the markets served.

How will LF Edge help your business?

Of course, open source code with Apache 2 licensing is a great start for most software development today.  In Fledge’s case, the code is in its eighth release and deployed in industrial use cases for over a year.   Industrial developers can have more features, faster time to market and higher quality as their starting point!

 

Additionally, contributing FogLAMP to the Fledge project under LF Edge governance adds extra assurance and insurance for the developer.   They can feel confident in their decision to use and contribute to Fledge knowing the LF is backing the project and they remain in control of their own destiny with no cloud or other vendor locks.

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

Open Source is new to manufacturers and manufacturing is new to the Linux Foundation. So, the Fledge community consists of manufacturers, industrial equipment suppliers, integrators, OT system suppliers and technology suppliers.    Join us – help us, help you accelerate Industrial 4.0 adoption. It’s going to be fun!

To learn more about Fledge, visit the project page here.

 

 

 

 

January 30, 2020

LF Edge Member Spotlight: IOTech Systems

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry, Member Spotlight

The LF Edge community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that represent the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source edge solutions. Today, we sat down with Andy Foster, Product Director, at IOTech Systems to discuss the importance of a growing ecosystem, their IoT framework, the impact LF Edge has made and what the future holds for the company.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

IOTech’s vision is to build and deploy the pervasive secure, open IoT software platform for edge environments that helps drive innovation, global adoption, market velocity and scale.

The company is leveraging an open source strategy based on the LF Edge’s EdgeX Foundry project to accelerate growth of a global partner ecosystem and dramatically increase deployment velocity of IoT systems by reducing custom systems integration. The EdgeX project is aligned around a common goal – the simplification and standardization of the foundation for edge computing architectures in the IoT market.

IOTech is supporting the rapidly growing EdgeX global developer community and partner ecosystem by providing a fully commercialized version of the EdgeX called Edge Xpert.

This licensed offering comes bundled with a range of industrial grade connectors to popular North and Southbound and is available on multiple hardware and OS combinations with regular software upgrades and different support and maintenance service level options. Complementary professional service offerings include training, pilot project support, accelerated product extensions and third party product integrations.

Additionally, IOTech has extended  EdgeX with its recently announced Edge XRT, the first “hard” real-time edge IoT platform.

Edge XRT is designed to meet the needs of industrial edge applications faced with one or more of the following key challenges: deployable on ultra-low footprint embedded edge nodes; latency and response times measured in microseconds; requirement for predictable real-time processing and execution.

Why is your organization adopting an open source approach?

IOTech’s core business execution strategy is to support an open source business model. We believe that this is the only model that can realistically facilitate rapid global scale out of this technology in the window of opportunity that exists, both in terms of removal of barriers to development, deployment and Time to Market (TTM) for new products and services. IoT is also fundamentally about managing heterogeneity we believe that the market is demanding an ‘open’ versus proprietary approach at the platform level, our customers ultimately want choice of best of breed, not to be tied to one vendor’s solution.

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

We believe that the best way to address market fragmentation and drive edge technology adoption is through industry collaboration and an open architecture approach. LF Edge is creating an ecosystem of companies focused on addressing the key challenges faced by the next generation of edge systems.

LF Edge membership is growing rapidly and includes a broad spectrum of companies from major international technology leaders to new startups. The breadth of membership and expertise is helping to ensure a cross-industry approach, with organizations working collaboratively to solve a common set of edge related problems. By avoiding duplication while at the same time ensuring interoperability and re-use across LF Edge projects is key to speeding time to market and reducing the implementation risk of new edge technologies. 

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

Firstly, by collaborating with other organizations on the development new open source edge technologies allows companies to pool resources and leverage the collective expertise of many of the world’s leading technology providers. For IOTech, this has the significant benefit of enabling us to bring new products to market more quickly and share the costs of developing these solutions.

Secondly, LF Edge is helping to shape the future direction of edge computing and being part of the ecosystem gives IOTech the ability to help influence that direction, something that is much more difficult to do if we were not a member. It also gives us much better visibility into the where the industry and market is moving with respect to edge computing technologies, as well as access to some of the best brains driving this change.

Finally, being part of growing LF Edge  ecosystem provides IOTech with many commercial opportunities to partner with other member companies to collaborate on new projects and drive business growth.

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

IOTech are one of the founder members of the EdgeX Foundry project and have been actively participating in the project at various different levels from it’s inception. We have made significant contributions in terms of technical leadership and code contributions within the project. Members of the IOTech team currently hold the following leadership positions within EdgeX:

  • Keith Steele, TSC Chair and LF Edge Board Member
  • Jim White, TSC Vice Chair
  • Iain Anderson, Device Service WG Chair
  • Robin Chatterjee, Test/QA WG Chair

We have leveraged our expertise in OT systems to work extensively on EdgeX’s Device Service layer. This work includes the development of SDKs in Go and C and the implementation of a number of protocol specific Device Services including Modbus, BACnet, OPC UA, MQTT and Virtual.

As TSC Vice chair and original EdgeX architect, Jim White has been active across all of the project’s WGs, providing technical leadership and support to the EdgeX teams.  For almost three years Keith Steele has been Chair of the TSC, helping to coordinate the projects direction and actively promote its goals and objectives within the EdgeX ecosystem and wider industry.

In addition to IOTech’s contributions to EdgeX Foundry we are also participating other complementary LF Edge projects such as the Akraino Time-Critical Edge Compute project where our EdgeX experience can be shared within the wider LF Edge ecosystems.

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

Put simply delivery focus! Other bodies are focused on producing guidelines and possibly new edge standards, whereas LF Edge’s objective is to produce open source solutions that can be deployed in real system or proven blueprints that can be used to support real edge use cases. 

How will  LF Edge help your business?

Firstly, the collaborative development that is inherent in a open source project is allowing  IOTech to leverage a far larger pool of development resources than is currently possible on our own. This is helping us to bring new edge solutions to market more quickly.

Working within an ecosystem of the world’s leading-edge technology companies ensures that the technologies that we develop are addressing the real needs of industry. It provides our customers with the reassurance that our products were developed with broad industry support, helping reinforce the importance of openness and choice.

Finally, from a marketing perspective the profile of LF Edge generates a lot of attention in our target markets and the efforts of the LF marketing team provides member companies with lots of opportunities to complement their own marketing programs and also share costs, for example by attending key industry tradeshows as a co-sponsor on the LF Edge booth.

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

From IOTech’s perspective we’ve hopefully outlined the key benefits of joining LF Edge. We also think that these benefits will apply to most organizations. Our recommendation is to join, embrace collaboration and most importantly get involved. Your return on investment will be multiplied depending the effort you apply and the projects that you support. Where else can a company leverage the combined expertise in edge computing and resources of the LF Edge ecosystem, especially when combined with the many commercial opportunities for collaboration and partnering.

 

December 19, 2019

LF Edge Member Spotlight: ZEDEDA

By Blog, Member Spotlight, Project EVE

The LF Edge community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that represent the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source edge solutions. Today, we sat down with Aaron Williams, Developer Community Lead, and Erik Nordmark, Chief Architect and Co-Founder, at ZEDEDA to discuss the importance of a growing ecosystem, their IoT framework, the impact LF Edge has made and what the future holds for the company.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

ZEDEDA delivers visibility, control, and security to enterprise IoT and edge deployments through edge virtualization. Ours is the only cloud service for edge management built on the open sourced Edge Virtualization Engine (EVE). By bringing virtualization to the edge, we allow businesses to deploy and manage any application on any hardware and connect to any cloud, breaking down IT silos and simplifying IoT strategies. Customers can easily dropship gateways at distributed sites without needing on-site IT expert personnel, and can launch greenfield and brownfield applications at scale with a single click of a button. 

With ZEDEDA, organizations easily eliminate the complexity of today’s IoT solutions at the edge and gain deeper insights into their operations by more effectively leveraging sensor data, including through AI-powered analysis in the cloud.

Why is your organization adopting an open source approach?

Today at the edge, there is a heterogeneous mix of hardware and applications, which makes it difficult to coordinate an IoT strategy and make the most out of all the available data. As a result, many enterprises can become mired in vendor lock-in. Embracing open standards gives the whole community a common foundation to work from, increasing interoperability, lowering the barriers to entry in this space, and promoting innovation. 

ZEDEDA adopted open source right from the beginning because we saw the value in providing a shared standard for edge virtualization technology. We think of it as being similar to what Android did for mobile phones, in terms of creating a single template for developers to follow that then ensures operability across a variety of hardware. Additionally, by making EVE open to community contributions, we’re committing to building the best possible solution with experts around the world.

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

The reason why we joined LF Edge is simple: we believe that the fastest route to innovation and success in edge computing is by working together with other companies to create universal standards that we can all build off of. It’s been a great opportunity to come together with like-minded organizations, contribute our expertise, and work collaboratively to build the best ecosystem possible for the future of edge computing. By hosting several key open source projects and making them available to the community, LF Edge is making it simpler for the industry at large to adopt IoT strategies as part of their IT portfolios. We believe that the rising tide will lift all boats, so to speak.

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

There are many benefits of being part of this community. For one thing, it allows us to be at the table with other edge companies (both large and small) so that we can help shape the future of the edge in a way that benefits everyone. It also provides a learning opportunity when we all come together to better understand the different parts of the edge stack. Additionally, building our solution on top of code (EVE) that is open sourced through the Linux Foundation helps give our customers confidence that we’re working to the highest technical standards. Truly, we feel that we receive much more than we give as active participants in LF Edge.

What business/industry problems are you collaboratively working to solve?

Current solutions for edge deployments often leave several challenges unaddressed, and these are all problems that we help to solve with EVE and the ZEDEDA controller. For instance, typical edge management software has little-to-no interoperability, meaning that customers are locked into using a limited number of compatible apps, hardware, or clouds. By contrast, one of the main benefits of building our solution on top of the open-sourced EVE is that it gives all vendors a common foundation to work from: as long as their apps and APIs are compatible with EVE, they can run on any EVE-approved hardware. In the same vein, modern hardware and firmware isn’t generally suited to run legacy applications; however, many businesses still rely on legacy apps as a key part of their technology stack. By making use of virtual machines (VMs), edge virtualization allows legacy and modern apps to co-exist seamlessly on the same device. Security is also a critical part of edge deployments, with traditional solutions leaving businesses exposed to many vulnerabilities. By managing their edge deployments with EVE and the ZEDEDA controller, companies can mitigate against many of these vulnerabilities: EVE ensures that the device and data traveling to and from it is secure by leveraging the hardware root of trust, and the controller makes it easy to keep firmware and applications up-to-date with the latest software patches rolled out with a single push of a button.

 

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

ZEDEDA has been a major contributor to the Project EVE code base. In addition, we have worked hard to encourage our hardware and software partners to contribute their expertise to build out the hardware devices that EVE runs on.

How will LF Edge help your business?

Building on top of LF Edge’s Project EVE allows us to concentrate on what separates us from our competitors, secure in the knowledge that the foundation of our technology is solid. It also gives our customers confidence in our solution because it is built on code that meets the Linux Foundation’s high standard of technical excellence.

Can you give us an example of your LF Edge project in production and what problem it is solving?

A good example of EVE in production can be found on wind turbine farms. The operators of these farms face many challenges, including that the farms are remote, complex, expensive to maintain, and very large. There is limited IT staff on site, and a truck roll to do unscheduled maintenance can cost over $100,000. At the same time, downtime can cost $1,000 to $2,000 per day, which means that it is very important to the operators to have as much uptime as possible, but avoid unplanned maintenance.   

EVE works in conjunction with the ZEDEDA cloud-based controller to allow the operators to overcome these challenges. With EVE shipped on the device, the operator can take advantage of zero-touch provisioning and having a single pane through which to manage all devices. Since EVE is open sourced and works across a variety of hardware devices, the operator has the freedom of updating the hardware for new installs without making the previous installs obsolete. And with the 100% visibility and remote control of the devices, they are able to update their applications on the edge from anywhere at anytime.    

Project EVE Wind Turbine Demo Video by ZEDEDA

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

To borrow from Nike, “just do it.” Being a member of LF Edge allows you to be part of the conversation that is shaping the IoT revolution.  The Edge is too big and too complex of an industry for any one company to dominate, so the only way to create common standards and functionality is by working together. If you are not part of the LF Edge, you will be continually following the cutting “edge” of Edge development!  

 

November 19, 2019
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