LF Edge in 2020: Looking back and Revving forward
Written by Melissa Evers-Hood, LF Edge Governing Board Chair
Dear Community,
Happy New Year! As we kick off 2020, I wanted to send a note of thanks and recognition to each of you for a wonderful 2019, which marked several meaningful accomplishments for this organization. LF Edge was launched in Jan 2019 with an aim to unify the edge communities across IOT, Telco, Enterprise and Cloud providing aligned open source edge frameworks for Infrastructure and Applications.
Our accomplishments include:
- EdgeX Foundry has blossomed this year in participation, downloads, and use cases. EdgeX, as folks commonly call it, also graduated to Impact project stage and surpassed 1.5 million container downloads in 2019.
- Akraino, which also reached Impact stage this year, is preparing for it’s second release with 5 new blueprints for R2, with updates to 9 of the existing 10 R1 blueprints already released. Most notably, its broadening its blueprint profile to include new blueprints for Connected Vehicles and AR/VR, truly becoming a viable framework across edge applications.
- At the Growth Stage, Open Glossary provides common terminology and ecosystem mapping for the complex Edge environment. In 2019, the Glossary Project shipped 2.0 of the Glossary, which was integrated into the 2020 State of the Edge Report. The Glossary Project began the process of helping to standardize terminology across all LF Edge projects, and also launched the LF Edge Landscape Project: https://landscape.lfedge.org/.
- Also at the Growth Stage, Project Eve allows cloud-native development practices in IOT and edge applications. EVE’s most recent release, 4.5.1 (which was gifted on December 25, 2019), provides a brand new initramfs based installer, ACRN tech preview, and ARM/HiKey support.
- The Home Edge project, targeted to enable a home edge computing framework, announced their Baobab release in November. The Home Edge Project has initiated cross-project collaboration with EdgeX Foundry (secure data storage) and Project EVE (containerized OS).
- We also added 2 additional projects this year.
- Baetyl which provides an open source edge computing platform.
- Fledge which is an open source framework and community for the industrial edge focused on critical operations, predictive maintenance, situational awareness and safety. Fledge has recently begun cross-project collaboration with Project EVE and Akraino, with more information available here.
- Our reach has broadened with 9k articles, almost 50k new users, and 6.7M social media impressions.
I am excited about the work ahead in 2020, especially as we celebrate our one year anniversary this month. We laid the foundation last year – offered a solution to unite the various edge communities – and now, with your support and contributions, we’re ready to move to the next phase.
LF Edge is co-hosting Open Networking & Edge Summit in April and our teams are working hard on several cross-project demos and solutions. We’re planning meetups and other F2F opportunities at the show, so this conference will be a must.
Our focus as a community will be to continue to expand our developers and end users. We will do this through having agile communities, that collaborate openly, create secure, updateable, production ready code, and work together as one. We also expect that there will be new projects to join and integrate. As we walk into this bright future, working as a unified body will demonstrate that the fastest path to Edge products is through LF Edge.
I look forward to working with each of you in ‘20 and seeing you in Los Angeles this April at ONES!
Melissa
