Linux Foundation Edge (LF Edge) is one of today’s most active organizations promoting edge computing, and is actively working to create new open source value applications for the IoT and Edge Computing
In the last few years, IoT and edge computing have created a new level of collaboration never before seen in the IT industry.
The Linux Foundation, as a forefront organization promoting the use of Open Source code, has created a new framework for companies looking for edge computing solutions without the limitations of proprietary software.
One key project is EdgeX Foundry, a vendor-neutral open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation, created with the goal of building a common open framework for IoT edge computing.
EdgeX recently hit a milestone of 1 million platform container downloads. Worth noting: almost half of these took place in the last few months.
LF Edge and EdgeX Foundry were present at the recent IoT Solutions World Congress, and we had the opportunity to talk to Jim White, CTO of IOTech Systems and Chief Architect of EdgeX, and Keith Steele, CEO of IOTech Systems and Chairman of the EdgeX Technical Standards Committee (TSC).
You can watch our interview with Jim White and Keith Steel below. A full transcript of the interview follows the clip.
IoT Times: Good morning Keith and Jim, thank you for your time today. Open Source projects have become very popular in the IoT ecosystem, and both big and small companies have joined the Linux Foundation to co-develop Edge Computing projects. Can you tell us more about LF Edge and how is working to expand Open Source in Edge Computing?
Jim White: LF Edge is really born out of a number of Edge related projects in IoT open source, that the Linux Foundation has tried to bring together under the same umbrella with the idea of harmonization and integration. So it was born out of necessity, based on the fact that you’ve got a lot of projects out there. If you’re a customer, how do you know which project to choose from and where does it fit in your infrastructure? LF Edge is Linux Foundation’s attempt to try and bring that together, much in the same way CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation] has tried to do so for something like a Kubernetes like environment. So think of LF Edge as being equivalent to some regard to how CNCF has been helpful to bring together a number of Kubernetes projects. So that’s our hope, is that going forward, LF Edge becomes the one stop shop for a user or a customer to say, what are the possible solutions that are out there under open source, under Linux Foundation, that can help with my Edge needs?
“Technology knows no borders, and technologists are engineers without borders”
Keith Steele: I think at the Edge, openness in particular is incredibly important, in the sense that at the Edge, we’re dealing with incredibly heterogeneous environments, right? There’s any number of protocols that we’re dealing with. There’s any number of cloud environments. There’s any number of communications protocols. I guess what you need to do is to think in terms of how do you manage that heterogeneity? How do you bring those things together in a way which is independent of the silicone provider, independent of the hardware provider, independent of the operating system, independent of application provider? How do you provide a plug and play environment in which people can live and work without getting locked into a particular vendor? So that’s kind of the overarching aim of this whole thing.
IoT Times: We noticed that many of the big players, like Arm, IBM, Intel, Dell, Microsoft, etc. are promoting using open source in project and applications. How do see the collaboration of all these companies creating projects together?
Keith Steele: Just to put it in the context of the EdgeX project, so we became part of LF Edge, and the massively positive thing for us as EdgeX was that it brought in, as you say, all of these big companies, like Arm, like Dell, like IBM, like Intel. And so it immediately gave a lot of visibility to our particular project. And as a result of that, we’ve had big involvement from those companies into the EdgeX project. And it helped to contribute massively to increasing the scale. One of the reasons, you’ve got to understand, why are these companies interested in being part of these projects? Everybody wants IoT to scale, right? Everybody wants it to, for the market velocity to increase. And openness and open source presents and opportunity for that to happen, and the results are there for everybody to see.
So we at EdgeX launched version one of our product, and that’s not the first release. There’s like four or five releases behind that. But the one was to say, okay, now this product is ready for prime time. And just as an example, as a result of that release, last month, we passed over a million container downloads, and half of those downloads were in the previous two months. So we’re starting to see a massive increase in scale and momentum behind the project.
Jim White: When you look at big companies like, say Dell, that’s kind of validation of Keith’s point too, that integration and being a part of it is the future. A company like Dell EMC, they’ve got lots of solutions. They would love to sell you everything they have. But even they recognize through their participation in these open source projects that you can’t. In today’s IoT environment, there are too many players. There are too many pieces. There are too many parts. They want to accelerate the market, but they recognize they have to work with others, with the other competing companies, with the other participating companies to mold entire IoT solutions. So it’s kind of a validation through open source that we’re seeing that happening.
IoT Times: Can you give us an example of a real-world project with several partners?
Jim White: Just one example of a vertical that’s demonstrated here at the show is our building automation solution. And in that one building automation use case, in that one demonstration, you’ve got Dell hardware, you’ve got Schneider PLCs, you’ve got Samsung devices, you’ve got EdgeX Foundry as the open source middleware amongst it all, but we’ve also got VMware to help do the updates and the management. We’ve got RSA products for security. And that’s just one use case, one sample demonstration. That’s pretty exemplary, I think, of the type of environment you find now in these edge and IoT solutions.
Keith Steele: I think to Jim’s points, there’s actually no one company provides an end to end IoT solution, right? It tends to be a conglomeration of several different companies collaborating to deliver a solution. And so you mentioned all the companies that are involved, and I’d like to emphasize that actually, the technology is really only one aspect of what any project needs to think about. Any open source project has to have a huge ecosystem behind it. If it doesn’t have that ecosystem, then the project is going to be of absolutely no use to anybody. And in the case of a framework like EdgeX, where people can come in and add value in a particular part. So we’ve got half a dozen people, half a dozen of the foremost security companies on the planet collaborating around the security aspects of EdgeX, things like management and orchestration of application.
Again, there’s literally sort of seven or eight of the top companies involved in that aspect all working to not necessarily provide open source solutions, because it’s not all about open source. But they want to come in and add value to the framework. And the big advantage to them of, say, EdgeX is it provides that common set of APIs around which people can collaborate around the data. There’s one diagram out there which shows all the kind of players in Edge, and the names are so small you can’t even recognize, there’s so many. Can you imagine if you’re a customer trying to make sense out of that? Okay? The only way to make sense out of it is to have something in the middle that basically manages that complexity. You need a plug and play environment for the Edge, and that’s what we’re trying to provide with EdgeX.
IoT Times: Recently the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) joined the OpenFog Consortium, another form of Edge Computing. How is that melting together?
Jim White: I think what IIC and OpenFog and all of them have helped to do is to help highlight the fact that Edge IoT is not just about things. It’s not just about sensors and devices, that they’ve extended the vocabulary up into the enterprise. People are recognizing there’s a continuum from where you’re at with your devices and things, and getting that information into your IT or divisions means you have to meld into the cloud. You have to meld into the enterprise and the solutions. And that’s the vocabulary, maybe poorly chosen terms in terms of Fog, but the vocabulary and the discussion they started with IIC’s test beds, really starting to demonstrate that through products, which is again what EdgeX Foundry and a lot of Linux Foundation projects are about. That conversation is going to continue. Under which standard bodies, which organizations that meld or form, probably to be determined. But the goodness of that is that people are starting to recognize the problem as a whole, not as some sort of little microcosm.
Keith Steel: it’s not just IIC. There’s people working in China on a similar space, people working in Japan. There’s a European initiative called ECCE that’s just been announced. I guess the thing that EdgeX does in particular is bring code, bring open code. So these bodies would not be able to move forward unless people are actually going out there and producing some things that people can use. And that’s the big difference between the LF Edge and something like IIC. IIC is an industry body, where industry can collaborate and come up with requirements. They can test things out in their testbeds. But at the end of the day, LF Edge is actually producing real implementations that can be used as the underlying technology which is supporting these things.
IoT Times: This year, we noticed the absence of some important players on the exhibition floor, such as Intel and Huawei. How do you think trade wars are affecting collaboration?
Keith Steele: On the ground, it doesn’t appear to be impacting it at all. I mean, if you look at our project, for example, the downloads and the — you know, it’s a truly global project. There’s an awful lot going on in China. There’s an awful lot going on in Japan. There’s a massive amount going on in the States, Europe. The downloads of the project and the collaboration is truly global. The only thing that stops us really collaborating, okay, is time zones. You can’t have a meeting at any time during the day that is helpful to everybody. And so quite often you end up with somebody having to come on a call at midnight or whatever. But the commitment to these things, we’ll have times, we’ll have meetings and time zones that are convenient to Europe and the States. And we get guys from China coming on at like 1 AM and 2 AM in the morning to attend these projects. So in terms of on the ground and helping with these projects, there’s zero barrier at all. Everything within LF Edge is completely open.
Obviously, we’d like to see more members of LF Edge, and the membership is growing. But it’s a completely open project. You don’t have to be a member to participate. You can come and download the software. It’s on a very unrestricted license and so on.
Jim White: Technology knows no borders, and technologists are engineers without borders. Above that, certainly when you get into business and business dealings, I’m sure they’re going to be impacted by some of the political underpinnings of policy. But at a technical level, products like EdgeX go on and get built in a very seamless way to those politics. So from our perspective, it doesn’t impact us until you start to get to some business dealings of a particular country.
IoT Times: Thank you so much.