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Open Horizon

AccuKnox joins mimik Technologies, IBM as Open Horizon project partner

By Blog, Open Horizon

The Open Horizon project, contributed by IBM to the Linux Foundation, developed a solution to automate complex edge computing workload and analytics placement decisions. Open Horizon also provides end-to-end security for the deployment process using security best practices. As a result of its rigorous adherence to recommended procedures, the Open Horizon project recently earned the OpenSSF Best Practices badge.

While Open Horizon provides secure container deployment, it cannot guarantee that a container is free of flawed code or other vulnerabilities that could put the system at risk, nor that a container is inherently safe from someone else’s malicious workloads running on the same host. That’s where a dynamic runtime security solution like KubeArmor comes in.

KubeArmor is an open-source project at CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) foundation that secures containerized workloads.  But until recently it only did so within Kubernetes clusters. AccuKnox, in conjunction with KubeArmor and Open Horizon, added additional coverage to KubeArmor to ensure the security of deployed workloads on both Kubernetes clusters and bare Linux hosts running a container engine like Docker or podman.

KubeArmor provides deep visibility into the behavior of the deployed workload, including network, process, and file operations. This information is vital when making policy decisions related to workload security. In the context of Open Horizon, it was interesting to observe the runtime behavior of the anax agent and the containerized edge workloads that it deployed.

After thorough evaluation and approval by IBM developers, AccuKnox contributed the integration code to the Open Horizon project. The contribution was significant enough to qualify AccuKnox for membership in the Open Horizon project as a partner and voting member. The Technical Steering Committee then voted to invite AccuKnox to join based on the value of their work and the strength of their contribution.

To learn more about the Open Horizon project and how anax automates workload placement, consider attending the project’s Agent Working Group meetings.  The KubeArmor integration code is available in the GitHub repository.

May 22, 2023

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, November 15:

9:00am – 9:15am

11:30am – 12:00pm

12:10pm – 12:40pm

12:10pm – 12:40pm

2:00pm – 2:30pm

2:40pm – 3:10pm

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

3:40pm – 4:10pm

3:54pm – 4:01pm

4:20pm – 4:50pm

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

11:30am – 12:00pm

12:10pm – 12:40pm

2:00pm – 2:30pm

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

3:40pm – 4:10pm

4:20pm – 4:50pm

4:20pm – 5:30pm

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

 

September 7, 2022

LFX’22 Mentorship Experience with Open Horizon

By Blog, Open Horizon, Training

Hey everyone!
I am Ruchi Pakhle currently pursuing my Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from MGM’s College of Engineering & Technology. I am a passionate developer and an open-source enthusiast. I recently graduated from LFX Mentorship Program. In this blog post, I will share my experience of contributing to Open Horizon, a platform for deploying container-based workloads and related machine learning models to compute nodes/clusters on edge.

Background

I have been an active contributor to open-source projects via different programs like GirlScript Summer of Code, Script Winter of Code & so on.. through these programs I contributed to different beginner-level open-source projects. After almost doing this for a year, I contributed to different organizations for different projects including documentation and code. On a very random morning applications for LFX were opened up and I saw various posts on LinkedIn among that posts one post was of my very dear friend, Unnati Chhabra, she had just graduated from the program and hence I went ahead and checked the organization that was a fit as per my skill set and decided to give it a shot.

Why did I apply to Open Horizon?

I was very interested in DevOps and Cloud Native technologies and I wanted to get started with them but have been procrastinating a lot and did not know how to pave my path ahead. I was constantly looking for opportunities that I can get my hands on. And as Open Horizon works exactly on DevOps and Cloud Native technologies, I straight away applied to their project and they had two slots open for the spring cohort. I joined their element channel and started becoming active by contributing to the project, engaging with the community, and also started to read more about the architecture and tried to understand it well by referring to their youtube videos. You can contribute to Open Horizon here.

Application process

Linux Foundation opens LFX mentorship applications thrice a year: one in spring, one in summer, and the winter cohort, each cohort being for a span of 3 months. I applied to the winter cohort for which the applications opened up around February 2022 and I submitted my application on 4th February 2022 for the Open Horizon Project. I remember there were three documents mandatory for submitting the application:

1. Updated Resume/CV

2. Cover Letter

(this is very very important in terms of your selection so cover everything in your cover letter and maybe add links to your projects, achievements, or wherever you think they can add great value)

The cover letter should cover these points primarily👇

  • How did you find out about our mentorship program?
  • Why are you interested in this program?
  • What experience and knowledge/skills do you have that are applicable to this program?
  • What do you hope to get out of this mentorship experience?

3. A permission document from your university stating they have no obligation over the entire span of the mentorship was also required(this depends on org to org and may not be asked as well)

Selection Mail

The LFX acceptance mail was a major achievement for me as at that period of time I was constantly getting rejections and I had absolutely no idea about how things were gonna work out for me. I was constantly doubting myself and hence this mail not only boosted my confidence but also gave me a ray of hope of achieving things by working hard towards it consistently. A major thanks to my mentors,  Joe Pearson and Troy Fine, for believing in me and giving me this opportunity.⭐

My Mentorship Journey

Starting off from the day I applied to the LFX until getting selected as an LFX Mentee and working successfully for over 3 months and a half, it felt surreal. I have been contributing to open-source projects and organizations before. But being a part of LFX gave me such a huge learning curve and a sense of credibility and ownership that I got here wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else.

I still remember setting up the  mgmt-hub all-in-one script locally and I thought it was just a cakewalk, well it was not. I literally used to try every single day to run the script but somehow it would end up giving some errors, I used to google them and apply the results but still, it would fail. But one thing which I consistently did was share my progress regularly with my mentor, Troy no matter if the script used to fail but still I used to communicate that with Troy, I would send him logs and he used to give me some probable solutions for the same but still the script used to fail. I then messaged in  the open-horizon-examples group and Joe used to help with my doubts, a huge thanks to him and Troy for helping me figure out things patiently. After over a month on April 1st, the script got successfully executed and then I started to work on the issues assigned by Troy.

These three months taught me to be consistent no matter what the circumstances are and work patiently which I wouldn’t have learned in my college. This experience would no doubt make me a better developer and engineer along with the best practices followed. A timeline of my journey has been shared here.

  1. Checkout my contributions here
  2. Checkout open-horizon-services repo

Concluding the program

The LFX Mentorship Program was a great great experience and I did get a great learning curve which I wouldn’t have gotten any other way. The program not only encourages developers to kick-start their open-source journey but also provides some great perks like networking, and learning from the best minds. I would like to thank my mentors Joe Pearson, Troy Fine, and Glen Darling because without their support and patience this wouldn’t have been possible. I would be forever grateful for this opportunity.

Special thanks to my mentor Troy for always being patient with me. These kind words would remain with me always although the program would have ended.

And yes how can I forget to plug in the awesome swags, special thanks, and gratitude to my mentor Joe Pearson for sending me such cool swags and this super cool note ❤

If you have any queries, connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter and I would be happy to help you out 😀

August 24, 2022

LF Edge Releases Industry-Defining Edge Computing White Paper to Accelerate Edge/ IoT Deployments

By Akraino, Announcement, Baetyl, EdgeX Foundry, eKuiper, Fledge, Home Edge, LF Edge, Open Horizon, Project EVE, Secure Device Onboard, State of the Edge

Collaborative community white paper refines the definitions and nuances of open source edge computing across telecom, industrial, cloud, enterprise and consumer markets

 SAN FRANCISCO – June 24, 2022 –  LF Edge, an umbrella organization under the Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system, today announced continued ecosystem collaboration via a new collaborative white paper, “Sharpening the Edge II: Diving Deeper into the LF Edge Taxonomy & Projects.” 

A follow-up to the LF Edge community’s original, collaborative 2020 paper – which provides an overview of the organization and details the LF Edge taxonomy, high level considerations for developing edge solutions and key use cases, – the new publication dives deeper into key areas of edge manageability, security, connectivity and analytics, and highlights how each project addresses these areas. The paper demonstrates maturation of the edge ecosystem and how the rapidly growing LF Edge community has made great progress over the past two years towards building an open, modular framework for edge computing. As with the first publication, the paper addresses  a balance of interests spanning the cloud, telco, IT, OT, IoT, mobile, and consumer markets.  

“With the growing edge computing infrastructure market set to be worth up to $800B by 2028, our LF Edge project communities are evolving,” said Jason Shepherd, VP Ecosystem, ZEDEDA  and former LF Edge Governing Board Chair. “This paper outlines industry direction through an LF Edge community lens. With such a diverse set of knowledgeable stakeholders, the report is an accurate reflection of a unified approach to defining open edge computing.” 

“I’m eager to continue to champion and spearhead the great work of the LF Edge community as the new board chair,” said Tina Tsou, new Governing Board chair, LF Edge.  “The Taxonomy white paper that demonstrates the accelerated community momentum seen by open source edge communities is really exciting and speaks to the power of open source.” 

The white paper, which is now available for download,  was put together as the result of broad community collaboration, spanning insights and expertise from subject matter experts across LF Edge project communities: Akraino, EdgeX Foundry, EVE, Fledge, Open Horizon, State of the Edge, Alvarium, Baetyl, eKuiper, and FIDO Device Onboard. 

ONE Summit North America 2022

Join the broader open source ecosystem spanning Networking, Edge, Access, Cloud and Core at ONE Summit North America, November 15-16 in Seattle, Wash. ONE Summit is the one industry event focused on best practices, technical challenges, and business opportunities facing decision makers across integrated verticals such as 5G, Cloud, Telco, and Enterprise Networking, as well as Edge, Access, IoT, and Core. The Call for Proposals is now open through July 8, 2022. Sponsorship opportunities are also available. 

 

About The Linux Foundation 

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

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

 

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June 24, 2022

Open Horizon Begins Second Mentorship Term, Looks Back on the First

By Blog, Open Horizon

Written by Joe Pearson, Open Horizon Chair of the Technical Steering Committee and Edge Computing and Technology Strategist at IBM

This spring, the open-source Open Horizon project continued working with the LFX Mentorship Program.  As part the LF Edge umbrella organization, Open Horizon had access to both the Mentorship Program and the COVID-related funding provided by both the Linux Foundation and Intel which paid stipends to participating mentees.

Similar to our previous experience last Fall, we had a wealth of potential applicants to choose from.  Thanks in large part to being featured on the LFX Mentoring home page, our applicant pool grew from 30 last term to 43 this term.  This time, the range of educational experience from candidates was even wider – from sophomores to doctoral candidates.  The wealth of experience was much greater this term, and the drive and determination was incredible.  Our methods of choosing the top candidates last time narrowed the pool from 30 to 12, but this time only took us from 43 to 30.  After conducting interviews and matching applicant experience to our mentorship opportunities, we selected the final four candidates.

Two mentors returned for the Spring term, and we added two new mentors.  Returning were:

  • David Booz (Dave) – Chief Architect and one of the project founders, Dave is also Chair of the Agent Working Group and a member over the last six years. Dave understands the complete breadth and depth of the project code.
  • Liang Wang (Los) – Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM), Architect, and Chair of the China Manufacturing Special Interest Group (SIG). Los is creating a community around manufacturing and Industry 4.0 use cases.

The two new mentors were:

Dave and Bruce decided to collaborate and provide a challenging mentorship opportunity to the mentees by providing a linked project to work on.  One mentee would collaborate with the Agent Working Group and one with the Management Hub Working Group.  Together they would add the ability to support shared secrets.  On the Agent side, Dave chose:

  • Debabrata Mandal (Deb) – Deb is a final year student at IIT Bombay in Mumbai. Deb described his current work, saying: “I am currently working on an issue … related to fetching the logging information from the specified service using the service url. While solving this issue I am getting a more detailed idea of the working of the agent component.”

Bruce wanted to work with:

  • Megha Varshney – Megha is a final year undergraduate at Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women. She is: “… currently working on [an] issue wherein I will be adding an API which would provide org specific status info.”

Los cooked up a challenge this year by adding support for the RISC-V microarchitecture to the Open Horizon project.  For that effort, he selected:

  • Quang Hiệp Mai (Mike) – Mike is in the second year of his master’s degree program at Soongsil University in South Korea. He said: “Since RISC-V is blooming in China, supporting RISC-V arch for the agent device would attract more users in China market. So first I will port some of the examples to RISC-V arch then I will help to port Anax to RISC-V”

And Ben wanted to work with a mentee to evaluate and choose an appropriate technology and subsequently to migrate pipelines to that choice.  He wanted to work with:

  • Mustafa Al-tekreeti – Mustafa is a Ph.D. educator transitioning to a career in software engineering. He explained: “I am working on developing a CI/CD pipeline for Anax, one of the Open-Horizon projects, using one of the state-of-art technologies. First, we evaluate three of the available options (Circle-CI, GitHub Actions, and Jenkins Job Builder hosted by LF Edge) and summarize their pros and cons. Then, we implement the pipeline using the chosen technology.”

We’re now three weeks into the Spring 2021 term and beginning to make plans for a potential Summer 2021 term, which would open for applicants beginning April 15th.  In the meantime, we recently recorded a webinar with the graduates from our Fall 2020 term.  It was a great opportunity to get everyone together on a call and discuss what we accomplished and learned and to provide helpful advice to future applicants.

March 23, 2021

Open Horizon Moves to Stage 2!

By Blog, LF Edge, Open Horizon

Written by Joe Pearson, Open Horizon Chair of the Technical Steering Committee and Edge Computing and Technology Strategist at IBM

On Thursday, March 4, 2021 the Open Horizon open source project was officially promoted to stage two maturity.  This was the culmination of a process that began on January 27, when I presented the proposal to the LF Edge Technical Advisory Committee (TAC).

Introduction

The Open Horizon software project was seeded by a contribution from IBM to the Linux Foundation in April 2020.  The project’s mission: to develop open-source software that manages the service software lifecycle of containerized applications on edge compute nodes.  Since that initial code contribution, the project and community has grown as it has attracted new project partners and contributors.

About Stage Two

Reaching stage two is a significant milestone for open-source software projects because it is a strong indicator of both the organization’s healthy growth, and potential stakeholder interest in using the software as a solution for specific use cases.  In the LF Edge umbrella organization, projects have to meet the following criteria to achieve stage two:

  • Past community participation met previous growth plans
  • An ongoing flow of merged code commits and other contributions
  • Documented proofs of concept using the software
  • Collaboration with other LF Edge projects
  • Growth plan, including projected feature sets and community targets

Getting Started

Since the project began last spring, it formed a Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and began hosting public meetings last July.  The TSC then authorized the creation of seven Working Groups which are responsible for overseeing the daily work of the project.  Then a Special Interest Group (SIG) proposal was presented for the formation of a group to promote manufacturing and Industry 4.0 use cases last August, which was approved.

Growing the Community

The project has also been actively involved in reaching out to students and universities.  Thanks to funding from the Linux Foundation and Intel, the LFX Mentorship program was able to provide stipends for mentees who complete a term with Linux Foundation projects.  Open Horizon joined the LFX program and was able to mentor four students and early career persons from October to December 2020.  This mentorship program continues, and Open Horizon has just begun the Spring 2021 term with four new mentees.

Using the Platform

Last year, IBM created a commercially supported distribution of Open Horizon that was named IBM Edge Application Manager (IEAM).  We’ve seen Open Horizon, or Open Horizon-based distributions, being used in an autonomous ship, vertical farming solutions, regional climate protection management, shipping ports, and even the International Space Station to deliver applications and related machine learning assets.  And last week HP Inc, Intel, and IBM presented a webinar to invite retailers and vendors to participate in creating an Open Retail Reference Architecture based on the EdgeX Foundry, Open Horizon, and SDO projects.

Creating an Open Edge Computing Framework

The LF Edge organization provides a structure to support open edge computing projects.  This should allow those projects to collectively form a framework for edge computing if they support common standards and interoperability.  The Open Horizon project is working to further that goal by both working with other LF Edge projects to create end-to-end edge computing solutions when combined, but also to support existing open standards and to create new standards where none exist today.  An example of supporting existing standards is in the area of zero-touch device provisioning where Open Horizon incorporates SDO services, a reference implementation for the FIDO IoT v1 specification.

Join Us

Now that Open Horizon has demonstrated its value as a platform and a community, it is preparing to expand the community by adding new SIGs, Partners, and contributors to the project.  To work with the project community to shape application delivery and lifecycle management within edge computing, consider attending one of the Working Group meetings, contributing code, working on standards, or even installing the software.

Additional Resources:

March 5, 2021

How do you manage applications on thousands of Linux hosts?

By Blog, Open Horizon

Written by Glen Darling, contributor to Open Horizon and Advisory Software Engineer at IBM

If they are debian/ubuntu-style distros with Docker installed, or RedHat-style distros with docker or podman installed, Open Horizon can make this easy for you. Open Horizon is an LF Edge open source project originally contributed by IBM that is designed to manage application containers on potentially very large numbers of edge machines. IBM’s commercial distribution of Open Horizon for example supports 30,000 Linux hosts from a single Management Hub!

How can this scale be achieved? On each Linux host (called a “node” in Open Horizon) a small autonomous Open Horizon Agent must be installed. Since these Agents act autonomously, this minimizes the need for connections to the central Open Horizon Management Hub and also minimizes the network traffic required. In fact, the local Agent can continue to perform many of its monitoring and management functions for your applications even when completely disconnected from the Management Hub! Also, the Management Hub never initiates communications with any Agents, so no firrewall ports need to be opened on your edge nodes. Each Agent is responsible for its own node and it reaches out to contact the Management Hub to receive new information as appropriate based on its configuration.

Open Horizon’s design also simplifies operations at scale. No longer will you need to maintain hard-coded lists of nodes and the software that’s appropriate for each of them. When a fleet of devices is diverse maintaining complex overlapping software requirements can quickly become unmanageable with even relatively small scale. Instead, Open Horizon lets you specify your intent in “policies”, and then the Agents, in collaboration with the Agreement Robots (AgBots for short) in the Management Hub will work to achieve your intent across your whole fleet. You can specify policies for individual nodes, and/or policies for your services (collections of one or more containers deployed as a unit), and/or policies to govern deployment of your applications. Policies also enable your large data files, like neural network models (e.g., large edge weight files) to have lifecycles independent of your service containers.

I recently presented a hands-on Open Horizon deployment example at Cisco Systems’ “DevNet 2020” developer conference. In this example I showed how to take an existing container, publish it to DockerHub, define Open Horizon artifacts to describe it as a service, and a simple deployment pattern to deploy it. The example application detects the presence or absence of a facial mask when provided an image over an HTTP REST API. Cisco developers, and most developers working with Linux machines, can use Open Horizon as I did in this example to deploy their software across small or large fleets of machines.

You can view my Cisco DevNet 2020 presentation at the link below:

Additional Resources:

March 3, 2021

Open Horizon Mentorships with LFX

By Blog, Linux Foundation News, Open Horizon

Joe Pearson, Open Horizon Chair of the Technical Steering Committee and Edge Computing and Technology Strategist at IBM

Late this summer, a representative from the Linux Foundation’s LFX Mentorship program attended the LF Edge Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) bi-weekly meeting and gave a presentation about their mentorship program.  The program potentially gives open-source projects a turn-key mentorship program with minimal work needed to get it started, which sounded great to me!  At the end of the presentation, they offered to speak to each project’s leadership teams if they would like to learn more.

The Open Horizon project eagerly accepted the offer, since we had plenty of opportunities for interesting work and few volunteers. We were told that once we began accepting applications, we would be flooded with more than enough well-qualified mentee candidates.

Easy onboarding experience

The project sign-up process was ridiculously easy. We filled out the forms and specified that we wanted to see each candidate’s CV/resume, a link to their GitHub repo, and a cover letter explaining in a single paragraph why they wanted to be a mentee of our project.

Incredible applicant pool

The applications began to come in. At first two (pretty easy to handle), then two more (great!), then four more (OK, this is quite a few). Within two weeks, we had over 15! By the end of our open application period, we had over 30 which was more than enough to handle. In fact, we ended up identifying both a primary and a secondary applicant for each open slot in our initial fall term.

Choosing our mentors

To select our project’s mentors, we looked for maintainers in our project with a natural teaching ability, approachability, maturity, and availability. We also assembled a pool of potential items for our mentees to work on. The four mentors selected were:

  • David Booz (Dave) – Chief Architect and founder of the project, Chair of the Agent Working Group, and a member of the team from the start almost six years ago. Dave understands the project code from both the macro level as well as the specific details about how the client software — the Agent — functions.
  • Liang Wang (Los) – Technology Advocate and Chair of the China Manufacturing Special Interest Group (SIG). Los is building up the SIG, overseeing translation of the project materials, and creating a community around manufacturing and industry 4.0 use cases.
  • Troy Fine – Software Engineer and Chair of the Developer Examples Working Group. Troy oversees creation and maintenance of all code and services that demonstrate all project solution functionality from the simple to the complex.
  • Joseph Pearson (Joe) – Project Chair and Chair of the Documentation Working Group. Joe ensures that people looking to use Open Horizon, develop it, extend or port it, and to build solutions with it have the information they need.

Choosing our mentees

We created a set of filtering criteria to shorten the list down to candidates who were not only qualified, but also exhibited a natural curiosity about our project, and were eager to get started. We also approximately matched the geographic location of the candidates as well as their linguistic abilities.

The mentors then interviewed those candidates on the short list over Slack, email, and Zoom or WebEx. It was not an easy task, and we wish that we could have accepted double our limit of four mentees.

For the work the mentees would be completing, the mentors identified tasks that fit the candidate’s natural abilities and strengths and yet would stretch them a bit. We also aimed for tasks that could be completed within the timeframe of the fall term.

Anukriti Jain

Dave selected Anukriti Jain as the mentee for his Working Group. Anukriti is a Computer Science Engineering student in the last year of her undergraduate program. She is based in India.

Han Gao

Los chose Han Gao as mentee. Han Gao is pursuing his doctorate in the Netherlands.  His goals are:

*  Become an effective contributor to the Open Horizon project with a deep understanding at the code level around its architecture and key policy-based management flow.

*  Contribute by translating Open Horizon technical documentation into Chinese, as well as creating new hands-on guidance for getting started with an end-to-end example.

*  Broaden his view and build insight across other LF Edge projects.

Clement NG

Troy went with Clement Ng for the Examples Working Group. Clement, like Troy, is based on the US west coast.

Edidiong Etuk

Joe tapped Edidiong Etuk to assist with the Documentation Working Group. Eddie is from Nigeria and is pursuing a degree in Computer Science.  He has natural leadership qualities and is an eager self-starter with a gift for intuition.

Lessons learned from the mentorship program

Now that we’re about 2/3 of the way through the fall term, we have gained some perspective through the benefit of hindsight.  It turns out that four mentees is just about the right number for our small project to handle.

The tasks have been adjusted to ensure that each mentee can complete the work in the allotted time without too much stress.  And several of them have already gained such a sense of belonging and ownership that they plan to continue working with the project after their mentorship term is complete.  We highly recommend that other projects take advantage of this opportunity.

For more details about Open Horizon, click here. Stay tuned here for updates about the next mentorship.

January 12, 2021

Edge Excitement! Innovation & Collaboration (Q4 2020)

By Blog, LF Edge, Open Horizon

Written by Ryan Anderson, Member and Contributor of LF Edge’s Open Horizon Project and IBM Architect in Residence, CTO Group for IBM Edge

This article originally ran on Ryan’s LinkedIN page. 

Rapid innovation in edge computing

It is an exciting time for the edge computing community! Since my first post April 2019, we are seeing a rapid acceleration of innovation driven by the convergence of multiple factors:

·     a convergence towards shared “mental models” in the edge solution space;

·     the increasing power of edge devices – pure CPU, as well as CPU plus GPU/VPU;

·     enormous investments in 5G infrastructures by network and communications stakeholders;

·     new collaborations across several IT/OT/IOT/Edge ecosystems;

·     increasing participation in, and support for, open source foundations such as LF Edge, by major players; and

·     widespread adoption of Kubernetes and Docker containers as a core layer of the edge.

With this convergence, innovation and accelerating adoption, Gartner’s prediction that 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed at the edge, appears prescient.

Edge nodes – from datacenters to devices 

Much like “AI” and “IT” – edge computing is a broad and nebulous term that means different things to different stakeholders. In the diagram below, we consider four points of view for edge:

  1. Industrial Edge
  2. Enterprise Network Cloud Edge
  3. 5G / Telco Edge
  4. Consumer and Retail Edge
No alt text provided for this image

 

This model illustrates a few key ideas:

·     Some edge use cases fall squarely within one quadrant – whereas others span two, or sometimes three.

·     Solution mapping will help shape architecture discussions and may inform which stakeholders should be involved in conversations.

·     Edge can mean very different things to different people; and consequently, value propositions (and ROI/KPI) will also vary dramatically.

Technology tools for next generation edge computing must be flexible enough to work across different edge quadrants and work across different types of edge nodes.

Terminology. And what is edge computing?  

At IBM our edge computing definition is “act on insights closer to where data is created.”

We define edge node generically as any edge device, edge cluster, or edge server/gateway on which computing (workload, applications, analytics) can be performed, outside of public or private cloud infrastructure, or the central IT data center.

An edge device is a special-purpose piece of equipment that also has compute capacity integrated into that device on which interesting work can be performed. An assembly machine on the factory floor, an ATM, an intelligent camera or a next-generation automobile are all examples of edge devices. It is common to find edge devices with ARM or x86 class CPUs with one or two cores, 128MB of memory, and perhaps 1 GB of local persistent storage.

Sometimes edge devices include GPUs (graphics processing unit) and VPUs (vision processing units) – optimized chips that are very good for running AI models and inferencing on edge devices.

Fixed function IOT equipment that lack general open compute are not typically considered edge nodes, but rather IOT sensors. IOT sensors often interoperate with edge devices – but are not the same thing, as we see on the left side of this diagram.

 

No alt text provided for this image

An edge cluster is a general-purpose IT computer located in remote premises, such as a factory, retail store, hotel, distribution center or bank, for example – and typically used to run enterprise application workloads and shared services.

Edge nodes can also live within network facilities such as central offices, regional data-centers and hub locations operated by a network provider, or a metro facility operated by colocation provider.

An edge cluster is typically an industrial PC, or racked server, or an IT appliance.

Often, edge clusters include GPU/VPU hardware.

Tools for devices to data centers

IBM Edge Application Manager (IEAM) and Red Hat have created reference architectures and tools to manage the workload cross CPU and GPU/VPU compute resources.

Customers want simplicity. IEAM can provide simplicity with a single pane of glass to manage and orchestrate workloads from core to edge, across multiple clouds.

For edge clusters running Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP), a Kubernetes-based GPU/VPU Operators, solves the problem of needing unique operating system (OS) images between GPU and CPU nodes; instead, the GPU Operator bundles everything you need to support the GPU — the driver, container runtime, device plug-in, and monitoring with deployment by a Helm chart. Now, a single gold master image covers both CPU and GPU nodes.

Caution: Avoid fragmentation and friction with open source

This is indeed an exciting time for the edge computing community, as seen by the acceleration of innovation and emerging use case and architectures.

However, there is an area of concern as relates to fragmentation and friction in this emerging space.

Because the emerging edge market is enormous, there is a risk that some incumbents or niche players may be tempted to “go it alone,” trying to secure and defend a small corner (fragment) of a large space with a proprietary solution. If too many stakeholders do this – edge computing may fail to reach its potential.

This approach can be dangerous for companies for three reasons:

(1)  While isolated walled-garden (defensive) approach may work short term, over time isolated technology stacks may get left behind.

(2)  Customers are increasingly wary of attempts to vendor lock in and will source more flexible solutions.

(3)  Innovation is a team sport (e.g. Linux, Python).

Historically, emergent technologies can also encounter friction when key industry participants or standards organization are not working closely enough together (GSM/CDMA; VHS/Beta or HD-DVD/Blu-ray; Industrial IOT; Digital Twins).

So, what can we do to encourage collaboration?

The answer is open source.

Open source to reduce friction and increase collaboration

The IBM Edge team believes working with and through the open source community is the right approach to help edge computing evolve and reach its potential in the coming years.

IBM has a long history and strong commitment to open source. IBM was one of the earliest champions of communities like Linux, Apache, and Eclipse, pushing for open licenses, open governance, and open standards.

IBM engineers began contributing to Linux and helped to establish the Linux Foundation in 2000. In 1999, we helped to create the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and supported the creation of the Eclipse Foundation in 2004 – providing open source developers a neutral place to collaborate and innovate in the open.

Continuing our tradition of support for open source collaboration, IBM and Red Hat are active members of Linux Foundation LF Edge;

  • LF Edge is an umbrella organization for several projects that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system.
  • By bringing together industry leaders, LF Edge will create a common framework for hardware and software standards and best practices critical to sustaining current and future generations of IoT and edge devices.
  • Fostering collaboration and innovation across the multiple industries including industrial manufacturing, cities and government, energy, transportation, retail, home and building automation, automotive, logistics and health care
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IBM is an active contributor to Open Horizon – one of the LF Edge projects – and the core of IBM Edge Application Manager; LF Edge’s Open Horizon is an open source 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 – clusters and devices based on Kubernetes and Docker – all from a central management hub.

Open Horizon is already working with several other LF Edge projects including EdgeX Foundry, Fledge and SDO (Secure Device Onboard). 

SDO makes it easy and secure to configure edge devices and associate them with an edge management hub. Devices built with SDO can be added as an Edge Node by simply importing their associated ownership vouchers and then powering on the edge devices.

Additional Resources for Open Horizon: 

Open-Horizon documentation: https://open-horizon.github.io

Open-Horizon GitHub (source code): https://github.com/open-horizon

Example programs for Open-Horizon: https://github.com/open-horizon/examples

Open-Horizon Playlist on YouTube: https://bit.ly/34Xf0Ge

November 3, 2020

Onboard edge computing devices with Secure Device Onboard and Open Horizon

By Blog, Open Horizon, Secure Device Onboard

Written by Joe Pearson, Chair of the Open Horizon TSC and Technology Strategist for IBM

For many companies, setting up heterogeneous fleets of edge devices across remote sites has traditionally been a time-consuming and sometimes difficult process. At the Linux Foundation’s Open Networking & Edge Summit conference last month, IBM announced that Intel’s Secure Device Onboard (SDO) solution is now fully integrated into Open Horizon and IBM Edge Application Manager and available to developers as a tech preview.

The Intel-developed SDO enables low-touch bootstrapping of required software at device initial power-on. For the Open Horizon project, this enables the agent software to be automatically and autonomously installed and configured. SDO technology is now being incorporated into a new industry onboarding standard being developed by the FIDO Alliance.

Developers can try this out by using the all-in-one version of Open Horizon. Simply run a one-line script on a target edge compute device or VM and simulate powering-up an SDO-enabled device and its onboarding.

Both Open Horizon and SDO recently joined the LF Edge umbrella, which aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system. Thanks to IBM’s participation in the LF Edge open source community, contributors in the community are helping advance the future of open edge computing solutions.

See how SDO works

Simplifying edge device onboarding

Our team uses the term “device onboarding” to describe the initial bootstrapping process of installing and configuring required software on an edge computing device. In the case of Open Horizon, that includes connecting it to the Horizon management hub services. We have simplified the software installation process by providing a one-liner script, so that a person can install and run a development version of Open Horizon and SDO on a laptop or in a small virtual machine.

Before SDO was available, the typical installation process required a person to open a secure connection to the device (sometimes on premises), manually install all of the software pre-requisites, then install the Horizon agent, configure it, and register it with the management hub. With SDO support enabled, an administrator simply loads the voucher into the management hub when the device is purchased and then associates the configuration. When a technician powers on the device and connects it to the network, the device automatically finds the SDO services, presents the voucher, and downloads and installs the software automatically.

Integrating SDO into Open Horizon

The Open Horizon project has created a repository specifically for integrating the SDO project components into the Open Horizon management hub services and CLI. The SDO rendezvous service runs along side the management hub and provides a simple interface to bulk load import vouchers.

Visit SDO GitHub

LF Edge and open source leadership

LF Edge continues to strive to ensure that edge computing solutions remain open. In May 2020, IBM contributed Open Horizon to LF Edge. With Intel also contributing SDO to LF Edge, this ensures that another vital component of a complete edge computing framework is also open source.

We’re excited to collaborate with Intel to expand the deployment of applications from open hybrid cloud environments down to the edge, making them accessible, secure, and scalable for the developer ecosystem and community. For more videos about Open Horizon, please visit LF Edge’s Youtube Channel or click here LF Edge Open Horizon Playlist. If you have questions or would like to chat with leaders in the project, join us on the LF Edge Slack  (#open-horizon, #open-horizon-docs, #sdo-general or #sdo-tsc).

October 13, 2020
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