Written by Keith Steele, CEO of IOTech and EdgeX Foundry Board Member and the Chair of the Technical Steering Committee

Last week, we held a Face-to-Face Technical Steering Committee meeting in Palo Alto. It was another successful one and, after each meeting, my confidence grows that the EdgeX Foundry project will achieve great things.

Before reflecting on the week, I’d like to pass on my thanks on behalf of the community to VMware who hosted the event at their wonderful Palo Alto facility. California Burritos from their cool on-site restaurant was a culinary discovery for me!

EdgeX Foundry passed our one-year birthday in April, so from the EdgeX Charter standpoint, we now move from ‘start up’ phase to ‘steady state.’

While the term ‘steady state’ in the Project Charter refers to a transition to TSC members being voted from the contributing community, it’s a bit of a misnomer when you look at the project activity. This F2F TSC meeting demonstrated that EdgeX is far from static as it grew in attendance when compared to the last F2F meeting. More than 40 people showed up in person from all 4 corners of the world and many more joined by phone. We’re still very much in growth phase…

Elections were held for the TSC and we welcome new Working Group chairs Steve Osselton (Device Services, from IOTech), Trevor Conn (Core, from Dell) and David Ferriera (Security, from ForgeRock). Likewise, we thank Salim AbiEzzi, Doug Gardner and Tony Espy for their contributions on the TSC over the past year, all three will remain active participants in the project going forward.

So, on to the meeting…

The main discussion for the meeting was the status of the California Release, which is projected for early July and the roadmap for the Delhi release due in October.

Here’s a short list of what was scoped for the Delhi release:

• Device Service SDKs in Go and C will be previewed this summer and formally released with Delhi (including some representative device services).
• Performance targets for EdgeX are already being hit, but performance testing as part of the continuous integration and release process will be incorporated.
• Support for binary data to be processed by EdgeX for the first time to allow for carrying video images, audio data, and the like.
• The initial system management functionality will include an API for the management of the micro services and an agent to coordinate with other application/cloud infrastructure.
• Refactored services to incorporate better isolation to allow for future replacement of infrastructure elements such as the local persistent store or message infrastructure.
• The addition of an EdgeX UI which will be previewed this summer but officially released with Delhi.
• Research and design on a new Application Services layer to replace the existing Export Services layer of EdgeX will be published with plans to have implemented with the Edinburgh release (scheduled for April 2019).

Research and recommendations on options for the placement of MongoDB as the included reference database will also be announced with Delhi with the intention of offering changes by Edinburgh release.

I was really impressed with the level of collaboration and cooperation at the meeting as there was fabulous participation from all. If you couldn’t make it, this is a timely reminder that EdgeX Foundry is an open project and the recordings of the meeting can be found here.

One thing we did at this meeting, which I thought worked well, was we held a separate Face-to-Face meeting for the Device Working Group prior to the main meeting. Doing this enabled much deeper technical collaboration on important issues before the main meeting. I think this is something we should formalize into our meeting structure across all groups in future meetings.

Additionally, Samsung sought support for updating the project positioning and received it from the TSC. The suggestion is to avoid branding that suggests EdgeX as a strictly industrial IoT platform, especially since EdgeX can be used in much broader IoT solutions to include enterprise, consumer and mobile edge environments. While we will continue to strive to make the platform suitable for industrial workloads, the project will begin to ensure EdgeX Foundry marketing and literature addresses its broader capabilities.

This will certainly lead to a growth in the scope of the Vertical Working Group activity but market positioning was referred to the EdgeX Marketing group with TSC input provided.

The next F2F TSC meeting will be held in my home town of Edinburgh on October 23-24. You can register here and find more information available on the EdgeX Wiki.

We look forward to collaborating with you there!!

Best Regards,

Keith Steele, TSC Chair

If you have questions or comments, visit the EdgeX Rocket.Chat and share your thoughts in the #community channel.