Whether or not Edge computing serves as the backbone of mission-critical business worldwide depends on the success of the underlying network.
Recognizing the Edge’s potential and urgency to support Edge network, The Linux Foundation earlier this year created LF Edge, an umbrella organization dedicated to creating an open, agnostic and interoperable framework for edge computing. Similar to what the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has done for cloud development, LF Edge aims to enhance cooperation among key players so that the industry as a whole can advance more quickly.
By 2021, Gartner forecasts that there will be approximately 25 billion IoT devices in use around the world. Each of those devices, in turn, has the capacity to produce immense volumes of valuable data. Much of this data could be used to improve business-critical operations — but only if we’re able to analyze it in a timely and efficient manner. As mentioned above, it’s this combination of factors that has led to the rise of edge computing as one of the most rapidly -developing technology spaces today.
This idea of interoperability at the edge is particularly important because the hardware that makes up edge devices is so diverse — much more so than servers in a data center. Yet for edge computing to succeed, we need to be able to run applications right on local gateway devices to analyze and respond to IoT and Industry 4.0 data in near-real time. How do you design applications that are compatible with a huge variety of hardware and capable of running without a reliable cloud connection? This is the challenge that LF Edge is helping to solve.
Part of the solution is Project EVE, an Edge Virtualization Engine donated to LF Edge by ZEDEDA last month. I think of EVE as doing for the edge what Android did for mobile phones and what VMware did for data centers: decoupling software from hardware to make application development and deployment easier.
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