20 Billion devices - An IoT Framework to scale
Vijayan Swaminathan
Deliver Value for Business | Technologist | Founder | Strategist | Host
Disclaimer: I am not associated with EdgeXFoundry or any of its foundations. There was no compensation received to write on this topic.
Images credit: Except article header image all below images used for describing EdgeXFoundry belong to EdgeXFoundry website/documentation, EdgeXFoundry Presentation by Jim White.
Overview
Internet of Things have been a known phenomenon for almost a decade now. The exposure of Edge and Edge computing have been fairly new given the transition from Cloud Computing.
Background
As Internet matures and Web 3.0 evolves it is an extremely important necessity to manage how nodes interact. In an IP world where speed, security and quality are its utmost pillar stones of the post pandemic era, it can never be late to offer impressive technologies that behave at the speed of user adoption.
Important transformations from a scale point of view have exploded markets of:
·???????Gaming
·???????Automation
·???????Mobile
·???????Cloud Adoption
·???????Internet
The next era for cloud computing would be “Distributed cloud” given the massive explosion of Internet through 5G and all things “Smart”. Anything connected to cloud = “Smart” and has been a new wave of market, the Smart market.
Why Edge is important?
Edge computing is assessed to be tens of hundreds of billion of dollars through 2030. It is no wonder because massive industries have realized the power of internet and what it can offer.
Beyond numbers it is important to notice that there are huge industries and their devices that have escaped typical modernization in the last three decades, still continuing to operate on 50 year old technologies. No wonder secure and stable operations are bigger needs, often threats to these devices.
The hacks into critical infrastructure just expose the size of the problem even better. Not every exposure might be device related but IP related for sure.
What led to EdgeXFoundry?
Linux Foundation, that hosts important open source projects like Kubernetes, NodeJS, Hyperledger and numerous critical projects created a new foundation called LF Edge.
LF Edge is an umbrella organization to establish interoperable frameworks for edge computing. As Edge devices grow at an enormous pace of 20 billion devices around the world a year, it is hugely important to create a vendor neutral platform that works with any IoT device.
It is an ultimate necessity to provide a framework for interacting and managing “things”.
Any machine that man created is at a responsibility of being managed. To effectively manage these devices, we need a robust framework and operating solution that cannot just function but scale securely with demand.
It is important to note that key industry players including Dell, AMD, Samsung, Intel, Ubuntu just to name a few amongst 50+ companies have come to together and back a vendor neutral open source IoT framework.
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What is EdgeXFoundry?
EdgeXFoundry an opensource vendor neutral micro service framework for the IoT Edge Computing, be it things, sensors, devices, Edge gateways and all sorts of devices can be managed irrespective of the protocol. The aim of EdgeXFoundry is to be Hardware and OS agnostic.
How does the framework look like?
It is a loosely coupled micro service framework that facilitates interaction with devices and things securely over different protocols, MQTT, BLE, REST, MODBUS, many more and any other custom or proprietary protocol over the cloud or a hybrid environment.
What’s exciting is, it is a determined framework that the underlying protocol can be just anything. Either use existing framework or we could just expand it on need basis.
All microservices are a collection of Docker based images that can be hosted anywhere and on any cloud provider.
The services are independent yet segregated if needed by:
The Future
It is going to be an exciting journey looking at the devices getting accessible and more manageable every day. It is important to build a vision that values openness, scalable growth and that is secure. EdgeXFoundry does seem to have all the parameters to be a critical framework for large adoption, there’s definitely more to come.
Further Reference:
EdgeXFoundry Website: https://www.edgexfoundry.org/
EdgeXFoundry Github: https://github.com/edgexfoundry
EdgeXFoundry documentation: https://docs.edgexfoundry.org/2.0/
Question for you:
What do you think about the future of Edge computing and how it may evolve?
And what are some key business needs when it comes to IoT or Digital Transformation?
Let me know below.
Peace :)