In April, The Linux Foundation launched the open source EdgeX Foundry project to develop a standardized interoperability framework for Internet of Things (IoT) edge computing. Recently, EdgeX Foundry announced eight new members, bringing the total membership to 58.
The new members are Absolute, IoT Impact LABS, inwinSTACK, Parallel Machines, Queen’s University Belfast, RIOT, Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation, and Tulip Interfaces. They join a roster that includes AMD, Analog Devices, Canonical/Ubuntu, Cloud Foundry, Dell, Linaro, Mocana, NetFoundry, Opto 22, RFMicron, and VMWare, among others.
EdgeX Foundry is built around Dell’s early stage, Apache 2.0 licensed FUSE IoT middleware framework, which offers more than a dozen microservices comprising over 125,000 lines of code. The Linux Foundation worked with Dell to launch the EdgeX Foundry after the FUSE project merged with a similar AllJoyn-compliant IoTX project led by current EdgeX members Two Bulls and Beechwood.
EdgeX Foundry will create and certify an ecosystem of interoperable, plug-and-play components. The open source EdgeX stack will mediate between a variety of sensor network messaging protocols and multiple cloud and analytics platforms. The framework is designed to help facilitate interoperability code that spans edge analytics, security, system management, and services.
The key benefit for members and their customers is the potential to more easily integrating pre-certified software for IoT gateways and smart edge devices. “EdgeX Foundry reduces the challenges that we face in deploying multi-vendor solutions in the real world,” said Dan Mahoney, Lead Engineer for IoT Impact LABS, in an interview with Linux.com.
Why would The Linux Foundation launch another IoT standardization group while it’s still consolidating its AllSeen Alliance project’s AllJoyn spec into its IoTivity standard? For one thing, EdgeX Foundry differs from IoTivity in that for now it’s focused exclusively on industrial rather than both consumer and industrial IoT. Even more specifically, it targets middleware for gateways and smart endpoints. The projects also differ in that IoTivity is more about interoperability of existing products while EdgeX hopes to shape new products with pre-certified building blocks.