The EdgeX Foundry community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that represent the IoT ecosystem. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source solutions. Today, we sat down with François-Frédéric Ozog, Director of the Linaro Edge & Fog Group, to discuss open source, the edge, the impact EdgeX has made in their business and what the future holds for the company.
What does Linaro do and what is your role within the company?
Linaro gathers Arm ecosystem partners and leads collaborative engineering efforts. It helps companies work with the latest open source technology, build support in upstream projects, ensure smooth product roll outs and reduce maintenance costs. It is a major contributor to more than 70 open source projects and is consistently listed as one of the top five contributors to the Linux Kernel. I lead the group that focuses on the Edge & Fog upstream projects such as EdgeX Foundry and the Akraino Project.
Instead of duplicating efforts, Linaro members share development costs of core platform technologies to accelerate innovation and time to market. Linaro segment groups (Data Center & Cloud, IoT and embedded, Edge & Fog, Consumer) tackle market specific requirements. The IoT and Embedded group is focused on the things themselves with Zephyr Real Time OS while the Edge & Fog group is dedicated to solving gateways and edge computing nodes.
Why is your company investing in the IoT ecosystem?
The success of IoT relies on economically efficient solutions. This assumes software shall transparently leverage any available hardware features across processor architectures and models. Linaro and its members are collaborating to maintain Arm leadership and promoting cross architecture support.
Businesses currently have to invest a lot of time and energy into developing their own edge computing solutions. What are some of the business or technical challenges you have faced when adopting edge computing technologies? How have you overcome them?
There will be multiple edge stack solutions at least for regulatory reasons: a manufacturing edge gateway does not have the same regulatory constraints as an automotive edge node. Furthermore, a single node may host a number of stacks with different orchestration environments. From a feature perspective it makes no sense to unify all stacks and orchestration solutions. As a result, Linaro is building a common platform software substrate that can be used by all stacks and all orchestration solutions to simplify overall ecosystem control.
Why did your company join EdgeX Foundry?
Linaro sees EdgeX Foundry as an important edge stack that can be applied in a wide range of use cases. As a result, Linaro members want to ensure the stack can benefit from efficiency advances of any Arm processor providers to ensure best TCO.
If you’re interested in Linaro, Linaro Connect will take place on September 17-21 in Vancouver. Below are the edge-related tracks and the link to register: https://connect.linaro.org/register/.
Edge computing:
– The Networking of Edge Computing and Edge Stack on Arm Platform
– The practice of Contiv/VPP high performance container networking solution on Arm platform
– Network switches and TSN configuration
– LEDGE/Automotive reference platform
– A Call to Action: Accelerating Python with FPGAs
Security:
– BoF: IOT Security with Arm OSS
– Isolation using virtualization in the secure world
– EB corbos and the L4Re microhypervisor: Open-Source Automotive Safety
– Xen on ARM for embedded and IoT: from secure containers to dom0less systems
