Fledge’s Journey: Celebrating its Graduation to Impact Stage in LF Edge
Fledge was first introduced in 2017 as an open source project by the Linux Foundation. The Fledge project, an open source framework for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications, was initially created by Dianomic with the goal of developing a lightweight and scalable platform for collecting and analyzing data from industrial devices. Dianomic contributed the Fledge codebase to the Linux Foundation with the goal of establishing an open and collaborative community around the project, as a solution to the challenges faced by IIoT applications, such as the need for real-time data processing and analysis, the need for secure and reliable data transport, and the need for a scalable and extensible platform among others.
Three Maturity Stages for LF Edge Projects
Since its initial contribution, the Fledge community has continued to support, develop and grow Fledge as an open source project under LF Edge. The LF Edge technical steering committee (TAC) defines three maturity stages for projects:
- Stage 1: At Large Projects: projects the TAC believes are, or have the potential to be, important to the edge ecosystem as a whole. They are typically early-stage efforts looking to add capabilities to the LF Edge open edge platform as a whole in exchange for community support.
- Stage 2: Growth Stage: projects that are interested in reaching the Impact Stage, and have identified a growth plan for doing so. The Growth Stage is meant to harbor projects still working on their product or service and are working towards supporting adopters at scale using the product or service. Expectations of the project Growth Stage projects have well-formed and documented processes, procedures and practices for planning, designing, implementing and documenting their intended edge product or service. Growth Stage projects have the resources (leadership, people, tools, infrastructure) necessary to deliver their product or service.
- Stage 3: Impact Stage: projects on a self-sustaining cycle of development, maintenance, and long-term support. Impact Stage projects are widely used in production environments with a significant number of public use cases. Moreover they have broad, well-established communities with a number of diverse contributors. Expectations of the project include publicly known end-user production deployments, active participation in TAC proceedings, and as such have a binding vote on TAC matters such as the election of a TAC Chair, have publicly documented release cycles, ability to attract a number of committers on the basis of its production usefulness.
Fledge is the first and only project to graduate all the way to Impact Stage from At Large Stage under the LF Edge.
Today, Fledge is widely used in IIoT applications across a variety of industries and continues to evolve and grow with contributions from a thriving community of developers and adopters. The Fledge project and community focuses on industrial data pipelines to and from industrial assets and systems, edge applications and edge machine learning. Our community, users and contributors are suppliers and integrators to industrial markets as well as industrial companies including: AVEVA, Schneider Electric, OSIsoft, RTE, JEA, Google, Neuman-Aluminum, FLIR and Dianomic. The Fledge project has expanded into LF Energy’s Project FledgePower with 67 energy companies and suppliers and OSDU (an Open Group Project) with 167 Oil and Gas companies and suppliers. Fledge is deployed in both process and discrete manufacturing helping produce: drone military aircraft, engines, aluminum car parts, food processing, chemical polymers, energy, oil and gas, paper products, premium wines, professional auto racing digital twins and more.
While Fledge is open source and freely available for use, there are companies that offer commercial support and services for Fledge. For example, Dianomic, one of the original contributors to the project, provides commercial support, training, and consulting services for Fledge.
FLIR Systems, Inc. a company that specializes in the development and production of thermal imaging cameras and systems has contributed to the development of Fledge by integrating its thermal imaging technology with the Fledge platform. The integration of FLIR’s technology with Fledge enables industrial customers to analyze thermal data in real-time, allowing for early detection of potential issues and proactive maintenance. The integration of FLIR’s technology with Fledge has resulted in the creation of several use cases for the platform, including monitoring the temperature of equipment in manufacturing plants, detecting anomalies in electrical systems, and monitoring the thermal performance of buildings and infrastructure. Overall, FLIR’s involvement in the development of Fledge highlights the potential of combining edge computing and industrial IoT technologies with advanced imaging and sensing capabilities to enable early detection of potential issues, increased operational efficiency, and improved safety.
AVEVA, a leading provider of industrial automation and software solutions, announced a strategic partnership to enable the integration of FogLAMP with AVEVA’s industrial software solutions. As part of this partnership, AVEVA became a reseller of FogLAMP software, providing its customers with access to the open-source platform for use in their industrial applications. The integration of FogLAMP with AVEVA’s industrial software solutions enables customers to collect, process, and analyze data from industrial assets in real-time, providing insights into performance and enabling predictive maintenance. The partnership also provides customers with access to a broad range of industrial automation and software solutions, combined with the flexibility and customization of the open-source Fledge platform. Overall, the partnership between AVEVA and Dianomic aims to provide customers with a comprehensive solution for their industrial automation and IIoT needs, leveraging the strengths of both companies in the industrial software market.
Fledge is Not a General Purpose Edge Platform
Fledge was developed by and for industrial suppliers and companies to address the specific needs of industrial markets. Developers adopting Fledge get all the time to market, licensing and community advantages of Linux Foundation projects. They get a community with deep industrial, data processing and machine learning understanding. And, most importantly, they get a final product or service that meets the exacting requirements of industrial users.
