The IoT edge continued to grow in 2020, accelerating, according to some analysts, given the COVID-19 response and shift to remote working, remote monitoring, cloud adoption, and a general shift in the priorities of enterprises forced to invest in digital transformation ahead of schedule.
According to a December report published by Research And Markets, the global market for Edge Analytics was expected to spike by 35.2% in the year 2020 and thereafter grow to “reach US$31.4 billion by the year 2027, trailing a post-COVID-19 CAGR of 28.2% over the analysis period 2020 through 2027.”
The authors predict that “public and private sectors will prioritize investments in technologies that enable safe remote operations such as automation, cybersecurity, cloud, AI & IoT,” driving the demand for edge computing, bringing with it the opportunity to innovate when processing is faster and supports real-time control systems. With more automation and intelligence at the edge, less human intervention is needed across multiple sites, for example, including in places like data centers and factories where fewer people could work onsite and adapted to manage equipment, environment and break/fix remotely using cloud-based applications for service monitoring.
LF Edge’s EdgeX Foundry project has been driving community innovation and standards development at the edge for years now, and last month introduced their Hanoi release adding new features and simplification capabilities to their framework as new members joined and adoption soared.
According to the EdgeX community, EdgeX’s Hanoi release offers better data tagging, customized editing, and a new Command Line Interface (CLI) for improved performance and scalability.
EdgeX is a Stage 3 project (Impact Stage) under the LF Edge umbrella organization that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for IoT edge computing independent of connectivity protocol, hardware, operating system, applications, or cloud.
“EdgeX Foundry fosters an ecosystem of interoperable components from a variety of vendors to create a much-needed IoT framework for edge solutions,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Automation, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “With the support of LF Edge members and EdgeX contributors from across the globe, we are paving the way to enable and support a more robust solution at the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud, and Telco edge.”
Launched in April 2017, EdgeX is an open-source, loosely coupled microservices framework that provides the choice to plug and play from a growing ecosystem of available third-party offerings or to augment proprietary innovations, on a mission to simplify the process to design, develop and deploy solutions across industrial, enterprise, and consumer applications.
The Hanoi release is the organization’s seventh and has a number of features, including simplified Deployment, improved performance and scalability testing, the launch of the CLI, and a collection of new, platform-wide microservice APIs.
Key features include:
? Launch of the CLI: allows developers and users to issue a variety of EdgeX API calls to its services using terminal commands for easier scripting of tasks.
? Improved edge data tagging: developers can tag the data coming from a variety of edges so that everything is organized and configured by a preferred process that ensures the location of data can be found more quickly and efficiently.
? Easier and simplified Deployment: users will find that EdgeX now has a Compose file “make” capability that allows users to customize their file more easily without a lot of manual editing.
? Improved performance and scalability testing: Adopters can now calculate what a large-scale deployment with EdgeX would look, and put it in their roadmap plans. Hanoi brings the ability to provide guidance around EdgeX scaling as the amount of data is pushed through the system or how many devices of particular types you can hang on an instance of EdgeX.
EdgeX Foundry has a history of working closely with other LF Edge projects, including Akraino, Home Edge, EVE, and Open Horizon. With the Hanoi release, EdgeX has provided a sample service to export data from EdgeX to Fledge, an industrial IoT framework that focuses on critical operations, predictive maintenance, situational awareness, and safety. This allows EdgeX device connectors and capabilities to be used with Fledge instances. Conversely, with its next release, Fledge intends to provide a device service to allow Fledge instances to feed EdgeX instances.
The next step for EdgeX Foundry is the “Ireland” release, tentatively scheduled for spring 2021. Ireland will include a number of significant changes, including EdgeX’s new V2 API set and V2 API testing, additional security improvements, and easier transition/communication between device services to message application services directly.
EdgeX also launched a new website with more resources for developers, including commercial offerings from members of the community, and real-world use cases across Artificial Intelligence (AI), Industrial IoT (IIoT), Manufacturing, and Retail. Their recently launched Adopter Series showcases companies that already deploy the EdgeX framework in products and solutions, including Accenture, HP, Intel, Jiangxing Intelligence, ThunderSoft, and TIBCO.
We’ll continue to track and report on the progress of EdgeX, including coverage of their next release later this year.
Arti Loftus is an experienced Information Technology specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the research, writing, and editing industry with many published articles under her belt.Edited by
Maurice Nagle
