2023 LF Edge Annual Report – Update from the Technical Advisory Council
LF Edge projects and the Technical Advisory Council (TAC) ushered in 2023 realizing that edge computing had not yet become a go-to tool in the CTO’s toolbox as they tackled the twin challenges of application modernization and subsequent workload repatriation. Throughout the year, there were various successes and industry setbacks in the area of Software Defined Vehicles (SDV) as our projects made incremental progress on targeted solutions while pundits predicted the demise of electric vehicle (EV) mass adoption. After the runaway success of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Foundation Models, the year ended with our projects beginning to tackle the challenges of machine learning (ML) model deployment and optimization for on-premises and field-deployed use cases, pushing the limits of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) compute and constrained devices to tackle visual inferencing and acoustic analytics tasks. Here’s a human-generated summary of our notable milestones, achievements, and community growth.
Events
The year began with a completed Industry Solutions Showcase. This joint effort between the LF Edge Governing Board and TAC was created to demonstrate how solutions based on our projects are being deployed to solve current technical challenges. Along the way, these collaborations help projects to identify potential feature gaps and generate repeatable patterns and reference architectures. Intel worked with university teams around the world on an EdgeX Coding Challenge where school-based teams competed to build innovative solutions using the Matter protocol. This approach to a distributed competition took the event directly to the university classrooms to give a timely hands-on experience with the latest technology. We hope to see this type of event replicated and used more widely in 2024.
Announcements and Accomplishments
In a significant accomplishment this year, the Fledge project became the first LF Edge project to organically mature through all of the stages to Stage Three. Along the way, the TAC learned about and refined the maturation process as abstract ideals encountered the reality of IRL. Congratulations to the Fledge team and their TAC Sponsors Mark Riddoch and Daniel Lazaro for their pioneering work and paving the way for other projects to follow along in their footsteps and reap the benefits of their hard work. As Jim Zemlin mentioned in his keynote at LF Member Summit, Fledge(POWER) (same project and same repo), was used to reduce operating costs by 50% and it is going in production in substations across France. Fledge joins Akraino and EdgeX Foundry to the ranks of our mature At-Large projects.
With LF Edge growing from a core group of five projects to twelve over the last few years, it was time for the TAC to revisit our expectations of, and requirements for, projects desiring to demonstrate their growth and maturity. Subsequently, we spent a few months proposing, debating, and ultimately documenting new requirements for Stage Two (Growth) and Stage Three (At-Large) project requirements. A significant addition included requirements for security issue reporting, collection, and response items.
LF Edge also marked the first project to reach Stage Four (Emeritus) status as the Home Edge project was archived. This acknowledged that the project did not add new features, and the community was no longer sustainable. The code will continue to be publicly available, but will no longer be maintained. LF Edge also added two new projects in 2023. The first was NanoMQ, a new take on message queueing that both supports existing protocols as well as adding support for a new approach. This innovative project comes to LF Edge as the second contribution from member EMQX. The second addition was Nexoedge from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) based on research incubated there. It implements edge-based storage transparently distributed to cloud locations.
And last, Project EVE, with sponsorship from member Zededa, worked with the Board and TAC to create the LF Edge Sandbox solution. This platform will allow LF Edge projects to provide a simple-to-use interface to deploy both projects and solutions based on our projects to the LF Edge Community Lab and potentially other user-defined locations. This allows the public and our community to more easily evaluate, test, and ultimately develop solutions based on our projects.
Growth and Adoption
And as a way of documenting and publicizing how our projects are being implemented, LF Edge Marketing began compiling LF Edge Case Studies. These thumbnail sketches introduced readers to:
- UC Davis and Opus One used Fledge in both teaching and research to create safer wine production conditions and to reduce costs
- How Alvarium and Project EVE were used in a solution to monitor a BioGas facility
- An Open Retail solution approach with pluggable components using FIDO Device Onboard (FDO), Open Horizon, and EdgeX Foundry from partners including Scale Computing, IOTech Solutions, Intel, and IBM
- Electrical Power Management solutions and specifications with Eaton and EdgeX Foundry
Read the full 2023 LF Edge Annual Report, with community highlights from all LF Edge projects, TSC Chair, General Manager, Outreach Chair, and more.
