EdgeX Foundry, an open source interoperable framework for edge IoT computing, dropped its fourth code release titled Edinburgh.

“We’re calling it an anchor release for commercial adoption across IoT use cases,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager for Networking, Edge, and IoT at the Linux Foundation. At this point in the platform’s lifecycle, EdgeX community members have created a range of complementary products and services to support commercial deployments, he explained. This includes training and customer pilot programs, and plug-in enhancements for device connectivity, applications, data and system management, and security.

There are now more than 100 unique contributors to the project, and code downloads are approaching 5,000 a month at a 75% month-to-month growth rate.

“Now it’s ready for prime time,” said Jason Shepherd, an LF Edge governing board member and CTO of IoT and edge computing at Dell Technologies. Dell contributed the original IoT platform to the Linux Foundation, which then became EdgeX Foundry.

The project launched in 2017 and became one of LF Edge’s original five projects when the Linux Foundation started its edge umbrella group in January.

“If you look at IoT today, there’s a crazy number of IoT platforms,” Shepherd said. This plethora of platforms are also often tightly tied to proprietary hardware and software stacks, which makes it difficult for developers to design IoT applications and for industrial and enterprise customers to deploy and manage them across devices, he added.

EdgeX Foundry wants to solve this problem via an open source, loosely-coupled microservices framework. It’s independent of hardware, silicon, application cloud, or operating system, and it provides the choice to “plug and play” from third-party offerings or to augment proprietary technology.

“Fundamentally it’s about those open APIs,” Shepherd said, adding that these APIs “become a de facto standard through consensus using the open source community and making it tangible through the code. It says I don’t care what [operating system] you’re running on what hardware or what protocol, as long as you use the bare minimum set of tools in the form of [software development kits], you’re good.”

Some of the new features in the Edinburgh release include a stable API baseline, which aims to develop an ecosystem of interoperable microservice-based capabilities to protect companies’ investments in IoT. It also includes more SDKs for north and southbound connectivity and a wider range of standard connectors. And it adds binary data support, database swapability, and APIs to help facilitate management and monitoring capabilities.

Today’s Edinburgh release follows other recent LF Edge project updates. Last month LF Edge released Akraino Edge Stack with 10 deployment-ready blueprints. And in May the group received initial seed code from Zededa for Project EVE (Edge Virtualization Engine), another one of its five open source edge projects.