For any software project, one is a big number. By publishing a 1.0 release, you declare your project to be all grown up and ready to help change the world. We’ve just reached that point with EdgeX Foundry, the Linux Foundation-hosted project that is building an open platform for IoT edge computing. I’ll be marking the project’s new maturity at next month’s North American Open Source Summit in San Diego – where EdgeX Foundry was introduced a year ago.
My talk’s full title is “IoT Action at the Edge – EdgeX Foundry 1.0 Released!” The Edge is where the processing action is today. If you can process your data close to its source, you lower your network bandwidth needs, reduce response latencies and increase your ability to maintain data privacy. EdgeX Foundry offers a vendor-neutral and interoperable platform for reaping these benefits through a growing collection of microservices and support for multiple device protocols.
Here are some of our 1.0 release highlights:
- The software is now written in GO (except for the Java rules engine). That makes it more streamlined and gives it a smaller memory footprint with greater performance, in addition to making it more secure.
- Our APIs are now stable and commensurate with the project’s 1.0 status, we’ve committed to not changing them for at least a year.
- We have a new, Kong-based security gateway that reverse proxies all the EdgeX microservices and provides access management.
- We are building out an application SDK. We previously supported data export but didn’t have a full set of tools for data transformation prior to export. When the SDK is complete, it will make customizing your Edge processing even easier.
- We have added a Device SDK, one that we’ve already used ourselves to create a device SDK for GPS data.
In my talk, I’ll also discuss the device protocols that are supported and our security vulnerability handling process.
Lastly, I’ll share how VMware’s open source team has contributed to EdgeX over the past year. I’ve become co-chair of the Security Work Group, and in addition, we have another engineering core committer. VMware has contributed changes to help EdgeX microservices scale and provide data consistency, as well as to build a graphical user interface and make improvements to the notification service, tests, and documentation. For our next release, we are driving the delivery of a command-line-interface, a GPS device service and much more. We also created an automotive IoT proof of concept that my colleague Alexandre Courouble will be talking about in another OSS session.
If you are heading to OSS, I hope you’ll come by and learn more about EdgeX Foundry 1.0, what it’s now capable of and where we are hoping to take it next. If you can’t make the talk, you can find out more about the new release in the “what’s new” section of the EdgeX Foundry website and download EdgeX Foundry from GitHub to try it out for yourself.
Stay tuned to the Open Source Blog and follow us on Twitter (@vmwopensource) for all the latest open source news and updates.
