EdgeX Foundry Announces Major Milestone with First “Barcelona” Release

EdgeX ecosystem grows as Thales joins more than 60 members

BARCELONA, SPAIN and SAN FRANCISCO – October 3, 2017 – EdgeX Foundry, an open source project building a common interoperability framework to facilitate an ecosystem for Internet of Things (IoT) edge computing, today announced that the first major code release, dubbed “Barcelona”, will be available later this month. Barcelona is EdgeX Foundry’s first code release since the project launched in April 2017 and represents a collaborative effort by more than 60 member organizations to build out and support an ecosystem for Industrial IoT (IIoT) solutions. It is part of an established roadmap for a product-quality open source foundation that enables interoperable commercial differentiation. EdgeX demonstrations will be on display at IoT Solutions World Congress this week.

The complexity of the current IoT landscape and the wide variety of components available are creating paralysis among businesses looking to deploy IIoT solutions. EdgeX Foundry is a project of The Linux Foundation that is building an open interoperability framework hosted within a full hardware- and OS-agnostic reference software platform to enable an ecosystem of plug-and-play components that unifies the marketplace and accelerates the deployment of IoT solutions.

“We believe that EdgeX will radically change how businesses develop and deploy IIoT solutions, and we are excited to see the community rally together to support it,” said Philip DesAutels, senior director of IoT at The Linux Foundation. “Barcelona is a significant milestone that showcases the commercial viability of EdgeX and the impact that it will have on the global Industrial IoT landscape.”

Barcelona Features

The Barcelona code release represents the first major milestone on EdgeX Foundry’s technical roadmap. Key features for this release include:

• Stabilization of key APIs
• Better code quality, fit and finish
• More than double the test coverage across EdgeX microservices
• Addition of reference Device Services supporting BACNet, Modbus, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), MQTT, SNMP and Fischertechnik
• Extra “north side” Export Service interfaces that provide connectors to Azure IoT Suite and Google IoT Core as well as support for connections via MQTTS and HTTPS
• Progress towards the definition of unified APIs for security and system management

Several EdgeX Foundry members have already started to provide commercial solutions based on EdgeX, with others folding it into their product roadmaps.

Establishment of Bi-Annual Release Roadmap

The EdgeX Technical Steering Committee has established a bi-annual release roadmap that demonstrates a long-term strategy to provide a product-quality open source foundation for interoperable commercial differentiation.  The project is also working towards improved performance, lower start-up times and a reduction in the overall footprint via alternative Go Lang and C-based implementations of key EdgeX microservices. A preview of a Go Lang implementation is targeted for early 2018 with initial testing promising an order of magnitude smaller footprint than the current Java baseline.

EdgeX Foundry’s next major release, “California”, is targeted for Spring 2018. California will be a key step in EdgeX Foundry’s commitment to evolve the framework to support the requirements for deployment in business-critical IIoT applications. In addition to general improvements, planned features for the California release include baseline APIs and reference implementations for security and manageability value-add.

Additional roadmap items include support for more protocols such as OPC-UA, an optional high-performance message bus for intercommunication between microservices and further extensions for fog computing.

IoT Solutions World Congress

Live demonstrations of the EdgeX platform will be on display at IoT Solutions World Congress taking place this week in Barcelona, Spain. The EdgeX Foundry booth (Booth E541) will be filled with innovative member solutions from Canonical, CloudPlugs, Cumulocity, Dell/RSA, ForgeRock, IOTech, Linaro, NetFoundry, Neustar, RFMicron, Vantiq and VMware.

Other EdgeX Foundry members will also have EdgeX on display in their own booths, including Analog Devices, Bayshore Networks, Device Authority, EnOcean Alliance, FogHorn and Opto 22.

Ecosystem Growth

EdgeX Foundry has made significant progress over the past six months with more than 150 people from around the world joining face-to-face meetings to align on project goals, develop working groups and identify project maintainers and committers across key functional areas.

The growing EdgeX community broadly represents the IoT landscape with members providing products and services supporting analytics, visualization, sensors, security, and manageability, among others. Last month, Samsung joined as a Platinum member to expand the open source development of its IIoT edge platform, and today, EdgeX Foundry announces Thales eSecurity, a leader in advanced data security solutions and services, has joined as a Silver member.

“The Industrial Internet of Things needs consistent and high quality security standards in order to thrive,” said Jon Greater, chief technology officer at Thales eSecurity. “We are glad to be deepening our involvement with the Linux Foundation by joining EdgeX Foundry to work openly with industry partners to create a reliable and security-capable stack for IoT devices.”

For more information and to learn how to get involved, please visit the following EdgeX Foundry resources:

Website

Wiki page

Blog

Twitter

LinkedIN

Youtube

About EdgeX Foundry

EdgeX Foundry is an open source project hosted by The Linux Foundation building a common open framework for IoT edge computing and an ecosystem of interoperable components that unifies the marketplace and accelerates the deployment of IoT solutions. Designed to run on any hardware or operating system and with any combination of application environments, EdgeX enables developers to quickly create flexible IoT edge solutions that can easily adapt to changing business needs. To learn more, visit: www.edgexfoundry.org.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org. 

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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