Canonical joins EdgeX Foundry to help unify IoT edge computing

Fragmentation is the nature of the beast in the IoT space with a variety of non-interoperable protocols, devices and vendors which are the natural results of years of evolution in the industrial space especially. However traditional standardisation processes and proprietary implementations have been the norm. But the slow nature of their progress make them a liability for the burgeoning future of IoT. For these reasons, multiple actions are being taken by many organisations to change the legacy IoT mode of operations in the quest for accelerated innovation and improved efficiencies.

To aid this progress, today, the Linux Foundation has announced a new open source software project called the EdgeX Foundry. The aim is to create an open framework and unify the marketplace to build an ecosystem of companies offering plug and play components on IoT edge solutions. The Linux Foundation has gathered over 50 companies to be the founding members of this project and Canonical is proud to be one of these.
Here at Canonical, we have been pushing for open source approaches to IoT fragmentation. Last year’s introduction of snaps is one example of this – the creation of a universal Linux packaging format to make it easy for developers to manage the distribution of their applications across devices, distros and releases. They are also safer to run and faster to install. Looking forward, we want to see snaps as the default format across the board to work on any distribution or device from IoT to desktops and beyond.

Just like snaps, the EdgeX framework is designed to run on any operating system or hardware. It can quickly and easily deliver interoperability between connected devices, applications and services across a wide range of use cases. Fellow founding member, Dell, is seeding EdgeX Foundry with its FUSE source code base consisting of more than a dozen microservices and over 125,000 lines of code.

Adopting an open source edge software platform benefits the entire IoT ecosystem incorporating the system integrators, hardware manufacturers, independent software vendors and end customers themselves who are deploying IoT edge solutions. The project is also collaborating with other relevant open source projects and industry alliances to further ensure consistency and interoperability across IoT. These include the Cloud Foundry Foundation,EnOcean Alliance and ULE Alliance.

The EdgeX platform will be on display at the Hannover Messe in Germany from April 24th-28th 2017. Head to the Dell Technologies booth in Hall 8, Stand C24 to see the main demo.