In four short years, EdgeX has become the global standard at the IOT Edge; this blog examines why and looks to the future.
By Keith Steele, CEO IOTech, and member of LF Edge Board and EdgeX Technical Steering Group.
The emergence of Edge Computing
Back in 2017, “edge computing” was a forecast in a Gartner report, it was called “the mother of all infrastructures.” A new computing model, edge computing promised to alter how businesses interact with the physical world.
With edge computing, data from physical devices—whether it be a drone, sensor, robot, HVAC unit, autonomous car, or other intelligent device—is acquired, processed, analyzed, and acted upon by dedicated edge computing platforms. The processed data can be acted upon locally and then sent to the cloud as required for further action and analysis.
Edge computing helps businesses very rapidly and inexpensively store, process, and analyze portions of their data closer to where it is needed, reducing security risks and reaction times, and making it an important complement to cloud computing. It is, however, a complex problem.
As more devices generate more data, existing infrastructure, bandwidth restrictions, and organizational roadblocks can stand in the way of extracting beneficial insights. What is more, there is no one-size solution that fits everyone. Different applications require different types of compute and connectivity and need to meet a variety of compliance and technology standards.
EdgeX – A Strategic Imperative
This inherent complexity at the edge was recognized as a major barrier to market take- up at the edge; in the same way that common standards and platforms are applied across most of the IT stack, there was recognition that a common ‘horizontal’ software foundation at the edge was needed.
In June 2017, in Boston MA, under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, around 60 people from many technology companies, gathered from around the World, to constitute the EdgeX Foundry open-source project; the attendees had one aim: To create EdgeX Foundry as the global open edge software platform standard!
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At the outset, the EdgeX team saw an open edge software platform as a strategic imperative. EdgeX enables successful edge implementation strategies and makes the IT/OT boundary a key value-add in building new end-to-end IoT systems. Platforms like EdgeX support heterogeneous systems and ‘real time’ performance requirements on both sides of the boundary, promote choice and flexibility, and enable collaboration across multiple vendors.
Four years later with literally millions of downloads, thousands of deployments across multiple vertical markets, and a truly global ecosystem of technology and commercialization partners, we can justifiably claim to have achieved our goal.
Over the years the project has had something like 200 code contributors, from companies as diverse as Dell, Intel, HP, IOTech, VMWare, Samsung, Beechwoods, Canonical, Cavium Networks, and Jiangxing Intelligence. Some made small contributions, while others have stayed for the whole journey. This blog is a tribute to all who have contributed to the project’s continued success.
The Importance of Ecosystem
Open-source projects without a global ecosystem of partners to develop, productize, test, and even deploy stand little chance of success.
The EdgeX ecosystem was greatly enhanced in January 2019 when EdgeX, along with project Akraino, became one of two founding projects in LF Edge, which is an umbrella organization created by the Linux Foundation that “aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system.” This project aims to bring together complementary open-source technologies.
EdgeX standalone pre- 2019 was already of great value. However, as a founding project under the umbrella of LF Edge, it proved even more valuable as the momentum increased with additional global collaboration. The additional amplification and support across LF Edge projects, community, and members, helped turn EdgeX into a real high velocity project.
\EdgeX Fundamentals
There are several fundamental technical and business tenets we set out to solve with EdgeX:
Leveraging the power of Edge and Cloud Computing
Our starting point is that edge and cloud complement one another.
Cloud computing and data centers offer excellent support for large data storage and computing workloads that do not demand real-time insights. For example, a company may choose cloud computing to offload long-term data processing and analysis, or resource-intensive workloads like AI training.
However, the latency and potential costs of connections between the cloud and edge devices makes cloud computing impractical for some scenarios – particularly those in which enterprises need faster or real-time insights, or the edge produces massive amounts of data that should first be filtered to reduce cloud costs. In these cases, an edge computing strategy offers unique value.
Open vs. Proprietary
The idea behind EdgeX was to maximize choice so users did not have to lock themselves into proprietary technologies that, by design, limit choice.
Given the implicit heterogeneity at the Edge, ‘open’ at a minimum means the Edge X platform had to be silicon, hardware, operating system, analytics engine, software application and cloud agnostic. It would seem odd to embrace IoT diversity at the edge, but then be tied to a single cloud vendor, hardware supplier, application vendor or chip supplier.
Secure, Pluggable and Extensible Software Architecture
To offer choice and flexibility we chose a modern, distributed, microservices based software architecture, which we believe supported the inherent complexities at the edge. The other really big thing we defined was a set of open standard APIs that enable ‘plug and play’ of any software application at the Edge. Coming back to ‘product quality’ we also wanted these maintained in a way that any changes to the APIs did not mean huge rewrites for application providers.
Edge Software Application ‘Plug and Play’
A key promise of EdgeX is that it provides a standard open framework around which an ecosystem can emerge, offering interoperable plug-and-play software applications and value add services providing users with real choice, rather than having to deal with siloed applications, which may potentially require huge systems integration efforts.
EdgeX ensures that any application can be deployed and run on any hardware or operating system, and with any combination of application environments. This enables real flexibility to deliver interoperability between connected devices, applications, and services across a wide range of use cases.
Time-Critical Performance and Scalability
Many of the applications we want to run at the edge, including specialist AI and analytics applications, need access to ‘real-time’ data. These can be very challenging performance constraints, e.g., millisecond or even microsecond response times, often with absolute real-time predictability requirements. Edge systems can also be very large-scale and highly distributed.
The hardware available to run time-critical Edge applications is often highly constrained in terms of memory availability or the need to run at low power. This means edge computing software may need to be highly optimized and have a very small ‘footprint’.
Access to real time data is a fundamental differentiator between the edge and cloud computing worlds. With EdgeX we decided to focus on applications that required round trip response times in the milliseconds rather than microseconds.
Our target operating environments are server and gateway class computers running standard Windows or Linux operating systems. We decided to leave it to the ecosystem to address Time Critical Edge systems, which required ultra-low footprint, microsecond performance and even hard real time predictability. (My company – IOTech- just filled that gap with a product called Edge XRT. Its important real-time requirements are understood in full, as decisions taken can significantly impact success or failure of edge projects.)
Connectivity and Interoperability
A major difference between the edge and cloud is inherent heterogeneity and complexity at the edge. This is best illustrated in relation to connectivity and interoperability requirements, south and northbound:
- Southbound: The edge is where the IT computer meets the OT ‘thing’ and there is a multitude of ‘things’ with which we will want to communicate, using a range of different ‘connectivity’ protocols at or close to real time. Many of these ‘things’ are legacy devices deployed with some old systems (brownfield). EdgeX provides reference implementations of some key protocols north and southbound along with SDK’s to readily allow users to add new protocols where they do not already exist; ensuring acquired data is interoperable despite the differences in device protocols. The commercial ecosystem also provides many additional connectors, making connectivity a configuration versus a programming task
- Northbound: Across industry, we also have multiple cloud and other IT endpoints; therefore, EdgeX provides flexible connectivity to and from these different environments. In fact, many organizations today use multi-cloud approaches to manage risk, take advantage of technology advances, avoid obsolescence, obtain leverage over cloud price increases, and support organizational and supply-chain integration. EdgeX software provides for this choice by being cloud agnostic.
How does the EdgeX Vendor Ecosystem deliver customer solutions?
There are many companies offering value add products and services to the baseline open-source product, including mine, IOTech. There are also may examples of live deployments in vertical markets such as manufacturing and process automation, retail, transportation, smart venues, and cities etc. See the EdgeX Adopter Series presentations for some examples.
Where Next for EdgeX?
The EdgeX project goes from strength to strength, with huge momentum behind its V1 Release and we will soon release EdgeX 2.0, a major release which includes all new and improved API set (eliminating technical debt that has incurred over 4 years), more message bus communications between services (replacing REST communications where you need more quality of service and asynchronous behavior), enhanced security services, and new device/sensor connectors. The EdgeX 2.0 release will also emphasize outreach, including much more of a focus on users as well as developers. With this release, the community launches the EdgeX Ready program. The program is a means for organizations and individuals to demonstrate their ability to work with EdgeX.
Some Closing Thoughts
The full promise of IoT will be achieved when you combine the power of cloud and edge computing: delivering real value that allows businesses to analyze and act on their data with incredible agility and precision, giving them a critical advantage against their competitors.
The key challenges at the edge related to latency, network bandwidth, reliability, security, and OT heterogeneity cannot be addressed in cloud-only models – the edge needs its own answers.
EdgeX and the LF Edge ecosystem maximize user choice and flexibility and enable effective collaboration across multiple vertical markets at the edge helping to power the next wave of business transformation. Avoid the risk of getting left behind. To learn more, please visit the EdgeX website and LF Edge website and get involved!
