Written by Jim White, EdgeX Foundry TSC Member and Chair of Core Services Working Group
The EdgeX Foundry community continues to grow as does the EdgeX functionality thanks to contributions from around the world. In this post, I’d like to highlight an exciting addition to the EdgeX “northbound” interface. That is, a new capability built into the EdgeX export services that allows EdgeX data to be sent to Google Cloud IoT Core.
What is Google IoT Core? It’s a Google public beta cloud service (what Google calls a fully managed service) that allows you to easily and securely connect, manage, and ingest data from millions of globally dispersed devices. See https://cloud.google.com/iot-core/ for more details.
For those unfamiliar with the EdgeX architecture, the services responsible for organizing, formatting, transforming, etc. the sensor data collected by EdgeX and sending it to enterprise or cloud based systems are the export services. In the EdgeX and IoT communities, we often call theses the “northbound” services or interfaces as they are typically depicted on the top end of any diagram that depicts an edge platform. “Southside” services or interfaces are those that communicate with sensors, devices or other systems even closer to the “things” edge and are usually depicted at the bottom of any diagram.
Bernard Van Haecke from Schlumberger, Menlo Park, CA office dug into EdgeX when it was released and recently had his connector contribution approved and posted as part of the Export services. What his addition does is allow the export services to pipe data to Google IoT Core.
EdgeX export services already allowed for sending data to any MQTT topic or HTTP REST endpoint generically and to Azure IoT Hub specifically. We believe going forward, there will be lots of these connectors – some public and some private (perhaps you will need one to your own closed enterprise system). But Bernard will always have the distinction of being our first new connector on the northside. Thanks Bernard!
You can learn more about the Google IoT Core export on the EdgeX Wiki here: https://wiki.edgexfoundry.org/display/FA/Export+Services+-+Google+IoT+Core
