EdgeX Foundry, the Linux Foundation’s open source industrial Internet of Things (IoT) group, is making its first major code release, dubbed Barcelona, available later this month. The new release promises to help take the complexity out of IoT by supporting certain key APIs as well as industrial protocols like Bluetooth Low Energy, MQTT (a low-energy machine-to-machine protocol), and simple network management protocol (SNPP).
According to Philip DesAutels, senior director of IoT at the Linux Foundation, the Barcelona release will be especially helpful to small- and medium-sized companies that don’t have a lot of IT resources to devote to integrating different tools and components. “Today if you want to do what EdgeX offers, you have to have a room full of smart developers that can pick components from here and services from there and then integrate those and make them work together,” DesAutels said. “It’s very complicated.”
Other benefits of Barcelona include:
- Better code quality, fit, and finish;
- More than double the test coverage across EdgeX microservices;
- Extra “north side” export service interfaces that provide connectors to Azure IoT Suite and Google Iot Core; and
- Stabilization of key APIs.
The EdgeX Foundry also established a bi-annual release timeline. The next major release, dubbed California, will be available in spring 2018. It will evolve the existing framework to support certain business-critical industrial IoT applications. Other features include baseline APIs and reference implementations for security. The third release, which is named Dehli, will occur in December 2018.
DesAutels said that some EdgeX Foundry members have already started to offer commercial products that are based on EdgeX. One example is IoTech which is bundling components that use EdgeX combined with a software solution.
EdgeX Foundry launched in April and has more than 60 member organizations. DesAutels said that an existing project from Dell, called Project Fuse, kicked off the group. The goal of EdgeX is to develop a common framework for the fragmented IoT industry. That interoperability framework will be hosted within a hardware and OS-agnostic reference software platform and will allow components to be plug-and-play.