Ana Juan Ferrer, Atos Spain
June 1 2020
As Edge computing is gaining more maturity in the market diverse open source initiatives are emerging in order to provide open source solutions to the challenge of managing applications at the Edge. Here we will look at three of these initiatives: EdgeXFoundry, KubeEdge and StartlingX.
EdgeX Foundry1 is a vendor-neutral interoperability framework to enable collaboration on open and interoperable IoT solution with existing and self-created connectivity standards. Edge X Foundry[1] offers a micro-services software platform which permits to build an IoT gateway functionality out of an Edge device. EdgeX Foundry software components allow to obtain data from the so-called South Side (IoT objects within the physical realm) with Cloud Services (North Side) in which data can be stored, aggregated, analysed and converted into actionable information. It is important to remark that the framework also contemplates actuation processes from north side to south side.
KubeEdge[2] develops a “native containerized application orchestration capabilities to hosts at Edge”. It offers infrastructure services that combine networking, application deployment and metadata synchronization among cloud and edge environments. It is important to note, that overall KubeEdge architecture considers a centralised Edge management which is performed from the Cloud level. The consideration of a Cluster of devices at the Edge requires at current state of the integration among KubeEdge and standard Kubernetes[3].
Starlingx[4] is presented as “a complete cloud infrastructure software stack for the edge used by the most demanding applications in industrial IOT, telecom, video delivery and other ultra-low latency use cases”. A number of projects constitute now a days the Starlingx developments. These projects are detailed in [5]. Starlingx considers geographically distributed Edge sites of diverse sizes governed under a central data center which offers orchestration and synchronization services. Starlingx Edge Virtualisation platform includes deployment options for bare metal, VM and container-based workloads.
Other initiatives such as Eclipse fog05[6] and IoT Fog[7] have recently kick-off their activities. Atos and the PLEDGER project, we are closely following up on the progress of these and other related Open Source communities as a key aspect of the market and technology landscape in which PLEDGER results fit in.
