An Open-Source Project for Internet of Things Gateways

The field of edge computing has scored its latest endorsement: The industry group behind the Linux operating system announced that it would release an open-source standard for building gateways that sit between sensors inside factories, office buildings, city infrastructure – and the cloud. The standard, which is still under development, is supported by fifty companies right out of the gate.

Called EdgeX Foundry, the project debuted this week at the Hannover Messe trade show in Germany. It aims to lower the cost and complexity of installing gateways at the edge of the Internet of Things, allowing data analysis and device control to happen much closer to sensor nodes. Gateways will not always need to communicate with the cloud, where the most intense data-crunching takes place.

Developing gateways with EdgeX requires little more than snippets of standard code, which will be freely available. The code organizes the transfer of information from sensors in manufacturing robots, office lighting systems, shipping trucks, and wind turbines – to gateways or servers on the edge. That helps companies save money by allowing them to choose any operating system, hardware, and software.

Making the code open-source is hardly surprising for the Linux Foundation, which is supervising the EdgeX project. But endorsements for EdgeX also came from fifty companies, including Dell and Canonical, which produces Ubuntu. The code originated in a Dell project codenamed Fuse, which was revealed last year to rally support for edge computing, which would likely drive sales of Dell’s gateway boxes.

The concept behind EdgeX is not exactly new, though. A rival project called Kura is aiming to standardize code for internet gateways used in fog computing, a term coined by Cisco for shifting basic cloud functions to edge of a business’s network. Kura would create standards for how gateways sift through feedback from sensors, sending only the most vital information or worst failure alerts to the cloud.

With EdgeX, the gateways will contain around 125,000 lines of standardized code, which erect a software layer between different messaging protocols. The code will enable gateways to send automatic commands, provision devices, and scrub down metadata so that it can be organized faster and more accurately. With these services standardized, businesses will have less work to do when updating an IoT system.

EdgeX is a “modular architecture is designed to help anyone easily build edge computing solutions with preferred hardware, software, standards and services while minimizing reinvention,” said Jason Shepherd, Dell’s director of Internet of Things strategy and partnerships, who supervised the company’s Fuse project, in a statement.

from Electronic Design - Engineering Essentials Curated By Experts http://bit.ly/2pmzK79