EdgeX Foundry, a project under the LF Edge umbrella organization within the Linux Foundation, has introduced a second major release with advances in API sets, message-based communications, and simplified and more secure interfaces.
"As a leading stage 3 project under LF Edge, the EdgeX Ireland release has expanded use cases across retail, building automation, smart cities, process control, and manufacturing," said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager, Networking, Edge & IoT, at the Linux Foundation. "It's a key to standardizing IoT frameworks across market verticals from smart cities to oil and gas, retail, industrial IoT, and more. The collaborative efforts of the EdgeX community over the past four years have really come to fruition to produce the most comprehensive and robust open-source solutions for IoT frameworks across the grid."
"This release sets in motion the opportunity for EdgeX to offer its first-ever LTS or long-term support release as soon as the fall. This is a significant commitment on the part of our open-source community to all adopters that says we stand with you, prepared to help support your use of EdgeX in real-world, scalable, production deployments," said Jim White, chief technical officer, IoTech, and EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee Chair.
Among the many new features are standardized and modernized northbound and southbound APIs designed to improve interoperability across the IoT framework and advanced security built into the APIs, message bus, and internal architecture.
New device services (southbound) and new app services (northbound) included in Ireland are inherently secure (e.g., GPIO, CoAP, LLRP, UART), according to the announcement.
The EdgeX team also introduced the Open Retail Reference Architecture (ORRA), a new sub-project that provides a common deployment platform for edge-based solutions and IoT devices in concert with two other LF projects (Open Horizon and Secure Device Onboard).
"Beechwoods Software has been a contributing member of EdgeX Foundry since its inception and chairs the Certification Working Group. EdgeX technology is at the core of our EOS IoT Edge platform offering, for which we are readying our version 2 release based on the latest EdgeX code base. Beechwoods is pleased with the growing momentum of EdgeX Foundry and looks forward to continuing our support and collaboration," said Michael Daulerio, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Beechwoods Software, Inc.
"Canonical is a founding member of the EdgeX Foundry project and has provided technical leadership in the technical steering committee from day one. The Ireland (aka 2.0) release of EdgeX introduces much improved V2 REST APIs, a transition to a secure message bus for data ingestion, and many additional improvements to the security of EdgeX. The cross-company cooperation that contributed to the success and timeliness of this release once again demonstrates the power of open-source development. Snaps of the Ireland release of EdgeX are available from the Snap Store using the new 2.0 track and can be used to build secure enterprise-grade EdgeX deployments using Ubuntu Core 20," said Tony Espy, technical architect / IoT & Devices, Canonical, and at-large EdgeX Foundry TSC member.
"EdgeX Foundry continues to serve as the basis for our Edge Xpert product. As such, we see the release of EdgeX 2.0 as critical to our company's success in support of our customers. It provides the ability for IOTech to add new features and add more value given the new APIs, support for more messaging, and overall simplifications of the platform. On top of that, the move toward an LTS release in the fall based on EdgeX 2.0 is an important milestone of support shown by the EdgeX community. LTS tells adopters like IOTech that the EdgeX ecosystem stands behind them and is there to provide a scalable, reliable, and robust platform that can be used in production-ready solutions," said Keith Steele, CEO IOTech Systems.
Plans for the next EdgeX release, code-named Jakarta, are expected to be introduced by the end of this year.
More detailed information about the release is available on EdgeX Foundry's wiki page.
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
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