Growth in Edge Computing Spurs Creation of LF Edge Group

To help shepherd standards and interoperability for edge computing across the IT industry, the Linux Foundation has created LF Edge, an umbrella group that aims to create and popularize open standards for the adoption and use of IoT, telecom, cloud and other companies.

LF Edge, which the Linux Foundation recently announced, aims to help establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud or operating system to enable all edge computing products and services can work well together, regardless of vendor.

Five projects are the first to be gathered under the LF Edge initiative, including the Akraino Edge Stack, which creates an open-source software stack that supports high-availability cloud services optimized for edge computing systems and applications; EdgeX Foundry, which builds a common open framework for IoT edge computing; and the Home Edge Project, which Samsung contributed as seed code to concentrate on driving and enabling a robust, reliable and intelligent home edge-computing framework, platform and ecosystem running on a variety of devices.

The remaining initial projects are the Open Glossary of Edge Computing, which has assembled a helpful collection of terms related to the field of edge computing; and Project EVE (Edge Virtualization Engine), which will create an open and agnostic standard edge architecture that accommodates complex and diverse on- and off-premises hardware, network and application selections. Zededa contributed Project EVE. The Akraino Edge Stack, EdgeX Foundry and the Open Glossary of Edge Computing were formerly standalone projects at the Linux Foundation before being pulled into LF Edge.

Linux Foundation’s Arpit Joshipura

Edge computing essentially means shortening the distances between devices and the cloud resources that serve them by distributing new resources and software stacks along the path between today’s centralized data centers and the increasingly large number of devices in the field. By delivering computing capabilities to the logical extremes of a network, improvements can be found in performance, operating cost and reliability of applications and services. It can also reduce network hops as edge computing mitigates the latency and bandwidth constraints of today’s internet, which can help usher in new classes of applications. These gains typically can be found in close proximity to the last-mile network on both the infrastructure and device sides, according to the Foundation.

At its core, the LF Edge group aims to create a vendor-neutral platform that works with any and all existing IoT specifications for deploying, connecting and securing devices. LF Edge will bring the best of telecom, cloud and enterprise technologies to help ensure greater harmonization and accelerate IoT deployments at a global scale.

“The market opportunity for LF Edge spans industrial, enterprise and consumer use cases in complex environments that cut across multiple edges and domains,” Arpit Joshipura, general manager of the Linux Foundation, said. “We’re thrilled with the level of support backing us at launch, with more than 60 global organizations as founding members and new project contributions.”

Those founding members, which include …

… AT&T, Baidu, Dell EMC, Ericsson, HP Inc., HPE, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, Qualcomm Technologies, Red Hat, Samsung Electronics, Seagate Technology and WindRiver, along with the group’s initial code and project contributions means LF Edge is well-positioned to transform edge and IoT application development, said Joshipura.

Intel’s Imad Sousou

“As devices play more important roles in our everyday lives, the edge computing is one of the key driving forces for a new computing paradigm within the IT industry,” said Seunghwan Cho, executive vice president of Samsung Research. “As Samsung is one of the leading open-source contributors at LF Edge, we’ll be [at] the forefront of realizing and accelerating edge computing, which can provide assistance to a wide array of fields, including home edge, industrial and mobile edge computing.”

Imad Sousou, corporate vice president of architecture graphics and software at Intel, said the new group will help lead the way for edge computing standards.

“LF Edge demonstrates the collaborative power of open source, bringing communities together to address the challenges and opportunities created as rich computation and services move closer to the edge, whether that’s a factory floor, on-premises data center, carrier network or autonomous vehicle,” he said. “As a contributor to LF Edge projects and their related upstream projects, Intel is committed to accelerating the development of Edge software for a broad range of uses through open development and community collaboration.”

The Linux Foundation sponsors a wide range of open-source projects, including The Academy Software Foundation, the Ceph Foundation, the LF Deep Learning Foundation, the GraphQL Foundation, Cloud Foundry, Hyperledger, Kubernetes and The R Consortium.