EdgeX Foundry Releases the Most Modern, Secure, and Production-Ready Open Source IoT Framework

Four-plus years of collaboration, 190+ contributors, 8 million+ container downloads, new retail project ORRA, EdgeX Ready, and foundation for future, long-term support pave the way for Ireland release

SAN FRANCISCO – August 3, 2021 – EdgeX Foundry, a project under the LF Edge umbrella organization within the Linux Foundation, today announced it’s Ireland release. Focused on edge/IoT solutions, EdgeX Foundry’s second major release overhauls API sets, removes technical debt, provides more message-based communications, and simplifies and secures interface for adopters and developers, making the platform significantly easier to use and more reliable. 

“As a leading stage 3 project under LF Edge, the EdgeX Ireland release has expanded use cases across retail, building automation, smart cities, process control, and manufacturing,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge & IoT, at the Linux Foundation. “It’s a key to standardizing IoT frameworks across market verticals.”

“This release sets in motion the opportunity for EdgeX to offer its first ever LTS or long-term support release as soon as the fall.  This is a significant commitment on the part of our open-source community to all adopters that says we stand with you, prepared to help support your use of EdgeX in real world, scalable, production deployments,” said Jim White, chief technical officer,  IoTech,  and EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee Chair. 

Ireland Feature Highlights

• Standardized and modernized northbound and southbound APIs enrich ease of interoperability across the IoT framework
• Advanced security is built into the APIs, message bus, and internal architecture of EdgeX
• New device services (southbound) and new app services (northbound) included in Ireland are also inherently secure (e.g., GPIO, CoAP, LLRP, UART)

Commercialization & Use Case Highlights

• Open Retail Reference Architecture (ORRA): a new sub-project that provides a common deployment platform for edge-based  solutions and IoT devices. ORRA is a collaboration with fellow LF Edge projects Open Horizon and Secure Device Onboard, incubated by EdgeX Foundry.
• The new Edgex Ready program highlights users and organizations that have integrated their offerings with solutions leveraging EdgeX;  a precursor to a community certification program. Learn how to become EdgeX Ready through the project’s Wiki page. 

Learn more about Ireland’s feature enhancements in this blog post. 

Plans for the next EdgeX release, codenamed ‘Jakarta’ are expected in Q4’ of 2021. 

For more information about LF Edge and its projects, visit https://www.lfedge.org/

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Additional Quotes and Community Support

”Beechwoods Software has been a contributing member of EdgeX Foundry since its inception and chairs the Certification Working Group. EdgeX technology is at the core of our EOS IoT Edge platform offering for which we are readying our version 2 release based on the latest EdgeX code base. Beechwoods is pleased with the growing momentum of EdgeX Foundry and look forward to continuing our support and collaboration,” said Michael Daulerio, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Beechwoods Software, Inc.

“Canonical is a founding member of the EdgeX Foundry project and has provided technical leadership in the technical steering committee from day one. The Ireland (aka 2.0) release of EdgeX introduces much improved V2 REST APIs, a transition to a secure message bus for data ingestion, and many additional improvements to the security of EdgeX. The cross-company cooperation that contributed to the success and timeliness of this release once again demonstrates the power of open source development. Snaps of the Ireland release of EdgeX are available from the Snap Store using the new 2.0 track, and can be used to build secure enterprise-grade EdgeX deployments using Ubuntu Core 20,” said Tony Espy, technical architect / IoT & Devices, Canonical, and at-large  EdgeX Foundry TSC member. 

“EdgeX Foundry continues to serve as the basis for our Edge Xpert product.  As such, we see the release of EdgeX 2.0 as critical to our company’s success in support of our customers.  It provides the ability for IOTech to add new features and add more value given the new APIs, support for more messaging and overall simplifications of the platform.  On top of that, the move toward an LTS release in the fall based on EdgeX 2.0 is an important milestone of support shown by the EdgeX community.  LTS tells adopters like IOTech that the EdgeX ecosystem stands behind them and is there to provide a scalable, reliable, and robust platform that can be used in production ready solutions,” said Keith Steele, CEO, IOTech Systems. 

Resources:

• Download Edge Ireland via Docker Compose:  https://github.com/edgexfoundry/edgex-compose/tree/ireland
• Read the Wiki: https://wiki.edgexfoundry.org/display/FA/Ireland
• Find more details in our latest blog: Announcing EdgeX 2.0 – the Ireland Release
• Learn more about ORRA and join the project: https://wiki.edgexfoundry.org/display/FA/Open+Retail+Reference+Architecture: 
• EdgeX Ready: https://wiki.edgexfoundry.org/display/FA/Open+Retail+Reference+Architecture