EdgeX Foundry Launches China Project

EdgeX Foundry Launches China Project

Written by Gavin Lu, LF Edge member, EdgeX Foundry China Project Lead and R&D Director in the VMware Office of the CTO

LF Edge’s EdgeX Foundry recently launched a China Project, which includes but is not  limited to evangelism, engineering and marketing of EdgeX features, use cases, productions and solutions. Everyone is welcome, and all presentations and notes will be openly posted on the Wiki.

To kick it off, VMware recently hosted an EdgeX Foundry Meetup and a China Project F2F.  During the EdgeX Foundry meetup, eight speakers presented topics to about 100 attendees from Arm, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, ZTE, Redhat, Oracle, Wind River, Siemens, Advantech, SAIC, Suning, Yonyou, Oppo, Unigroup, GIT, BUPT, and a few universities and startups.

• Alan Ren, MSD of VMware China R&D, welcomed attendees and presented the agenda
• Xuan Yang, Director of LF China: “Using Open Source: Building an Enterprise IoT Platform Based on Linux Foundation Open Source Projects
• Gavin Lu, R&D Director of VMware: “The Development History, Status Quo, and Future of EdgeX Foundry China Community”
• Melvin Sun, Sr. BD Manager of Intel IoT: “Intel Open Retail Initiative.”
• Rocky Jin, Product VP of EMQ: “Kuiper-open source edge real-time streaming data analysis framework”
• Haihua Chen, WayClouds CEO: “EdgeX Foundry-based AIoT Cloud Native Edge Computing Platform”
• Xinghui Yong, Architect of JD Retail: “Application of EdgeX in JD Star Retail IoT Platform”
• Xiaojing Xu, Architect of Thundersoft: “Thoughts during the implementation of edge computing”
• Henry Zeng, Principle PM of AI Platform, Microsoft Aisa Engineering Institute: “Application of High-Performance Modeling Based on ONNX Runtime in Edge AI”

The Workshop

As part of the meetup, VMware also hosted a workshop, which provided a hands on opportunity to new comers or entry level developers to EdgeX Foundry, and provide an easy experience of edge application in full life cycles, from dev, test to package, publish, deploy, monitor. Another part of the workshop is to show how ML inference could be conducted easily by a set of common Rest API service support heterogenous hardware accelerators.

VMware provided full support for IT infrastructure, toolkits, application management platform and ML inference services based on our innovation projects around EdgeX Foundry. Around 55 people registered for the workshop and most attendees finished all tasks as planned.

F2F Meetup

In a smaller group of about 20 pre-registered people, VMware hosted the first China Project face-to-face meeting to prepare the 2020 plan. Sixteen representatives from 12 companies joined the discussion, including thought leaders from the Linux Foundation, VMware, Intel, Dell, JD, H3C, China Mobile, Thundersoft, EMQ, Wayclouds, Zilliz, and OriginalTek, etc.

Melvin Sun from Intel introduced the idea of China’s first EdgeX Foundry Hackathon, which triggered an engaging discussion about the date, venue, form, topics, collaboration approach, teaming topics, etc. The event is still in the planning phase, though we are hoping to host the hackathon in March.

Gavin Lu from VMware introduced the high level idea about China Project and a draft proposal on what could be done in next year. The draft plan of China Project in 2020 could be roughly divided into three categories:

• Evangelism
  • User/solution list: List all EdgeX Foundry users and relative solutions in China project wiki page, to encourage and advocate its usage.
  • Webinars: Keep (increase if necessary) the bi-monthly frequency, focus more on EdgeX app developers, in code level and architecture analysis.
  • Meetups: Plan for quarterly, or increase instances on specific industries, focus on architecture, functions, solutions and product integration.
  • Workshops: Host yearly or bi-annual, entry level code training, provide hands-on experience on EdgeX Foundry app development.
  • Hackathons: Leverage yearly or bi-annual, advanced code camp, focus on new features, projects, solutions, with sponsorship and awards.
• Collaboration
  • Internal
    • Solutions: focus on mature industries, like retails, manufacturing, energy, cities/campus.
      • Summarize use cases and customer requirements
      • Define reference architecture models and implementations
    • Test bed/certificate: focus on edge devices, OEM vendors and e2e solutions
      • Facilitate advanced developers and distribute dev kits
      • Develop and deploy test beds to validate solutions
  • External
    • Enhance collaboration with other relative industry organizations, e.g. CAAI, AII & ECC.
    • Active discussion with telco carriers on use cases of integration with 5G, MEC and Industrial IoT
    • Build partnership with developer communities, like Go-lang community
• Contribution
  • Encourage and assistant direct code contribution to EdgeX code repos
    • Provide help to interesting organizations, on code review, bridging connections, communications etc.
  • Organize translation of English docs to Chinese, or write tech posts in Chinese directly.

We have to build sub-teams to execute action items accordingly. With volunteering from representatives, industry sub teams were built with team leaders as following:

• Retail: Intel*, JD, Thundersoft, WayClouds, Dell, Zilliz, China Mobile
• Manufacturing: H3C*, Quarkdata, Dell, Thundersoft, Intel, China Mobile
• Energy: WayClouds*, Quarkdata, Dell, H3C, EMQ, China Mobile
• Cities/Campus: Intel*, Zilliz, Dell, EMQ, China Mobile
• Transportation: OriginalTek, China Mobile

Companies with * is the team lead of that industry sub-team. Due to limited members in transportation sub-team, there is no team leader yet there. All sub teams welcome new companies to join.

As for the core team, besides VMware, all industry team leaders join, i.e. Intel, H3C, WayClouds. To ensure daily work and communication, Intel is nominated as co-maintainer for China Project.

The China project core team and all industry sub-teams will conduct discussions separately, actively attract more companies to join, and produce annual plan and action items within two months.

For more information, stay tuned to the EdgeX Foundry China Project Wiki: https://wiki.edgexfoundry.org/display/FA/China+Project. All updates will be posted there.