Written by Dell’s Jim White, EdgeX Foundry TSC Member and Chair of Core Services Working Group
Last week, several members of the EdgeX Foundry community were at the OpenIoT Summit in Portland, OR, which was co-located with the Embedded Linux Conference. According to Linux Foundation representatives, the attendance of the conference was around 730, which is an increase from last year.
I was impressed by the level of content and quality in the presentations as well as the participant level and engagement at this conference. The booth displays were low-key (not a lot of big equipment demos or flashy give-aways) yet the engagement level between participants and the booth representatives was very high. During non-session periods, the showroom floor was packed with a constant stream of participants stopping by each booth to get background and details about the products and services shown (versus just trying to get the free t-shirt as you might see at other conferences).
From top: Janko Isidorovic and Drasko Draskovic (Mainflux), Jim White (dell) and Trevor Conn (Dell)
Several members of the EdgeX community presented talks and provided information about their work in the community. Notably, Janko Isidorovic and Drasko Draskovic (from Mainflux) as well as Trevor Conn and I (from Dell Technologies) gave session talks (links below).
- https://elciotna18.sched.com/event/DYM7/hyperscalable-unified-iot-platform-drasko-draskovic-janko-isidorovic-mainflux
- https://elciotna18.sched.com/event/DYMD/building-open-source-iot-ecosystems-jim-white-trevor-conn-dell
- https://elciotna18.sched.com/event/DYMC/using-microservices-to-create-a-flexible-iot-software-platform-jim-white-dell
Jim White (Dell) and Tony Espy (Canonical)
Tony Espy (Canonical) and I also presented two beginner’s training labs on EdgeX. The link to the lab session is below, and you might find the training materials (located at the bottom of the session notes) helpful in your own spin-up on EdgeX. In total, almost 100 participants attended these sessions and was introduced to or engaged with EdgeX Foundry in one way or another.
Additionally, Dell Technologies’ own Patricia Flores made a good plug for EdgeX and put on a great show during her talk in one of the morning keynote sessions entitled “Federated Analytics at Scale.”
Patricia Flores (Dell) giving a keynote speech
In discussing EdgeX with the attendees, I believe EdgeX’s open, interoperable, microservice architecture is still drawing a lot of attention and consideration from companies exploring IoT solutions. It was also clear that the current EdgeX developer focus and emphasis on targeting smaller footprint devices (with Go) was significant and left a resounding positive impression on the global IoT community. EdgeX will also need to deliver – in measured steps starting with the California release – security and system management capabilities.
Next year’s OpenIoT Summit is in Monterey California. Hope to see your there!
