The first three are former standalone Linux Foundation projects. The long-term goal is to create an open-source software stack, which will bring together the best of telecom, cloud, and enterprise Edge technologies. The LF Edge is not trying to standardize hardware or closely-related technologies such as Bluetooth or 5G.
Most companies realize that we need standardized Edge computing sooner rather than later. That’s because we’re moving from legacy embedded devices to cloud-native computing devices. To make this work well, IoT developers need vendor-neutral platforms, open-software and standards and a shared vocabulary for Edge technologies.
As Jason Shepherd, former governing board chair of EdgeX Foundry and Dell Technologies’ IoT and Edge Computing CTO, said in a statement, “LF Edge will create a comprehensive and coordinated set of foundational open-source tools to enable developers to accelerate time to value in creating IoT and Edge computing solutions.
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LF Edge is starting with support from many top powers across the Edge computing space. They include: Arm, AT&T, Baidu, Canonical, Dell HPE, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Qualcomm, Red Hat, and Samsung. One important IoT player, Microsoft, has not joined in.
Joshipura said, “Microsoft may come on board later. Microsoft’s first goal is to get their devices to run on the Azure stack. Once they have the APIs for these devices and standards set, Microsoft will be interested in what we’re doing. We’re already in discussions with them.”
So will this work? I think it has a good shot. It’s brought together most of the major Edge players and everyone recognizes the need for standardization. Also, like most open-source based standardization efforts, it’s based on real code rather than years-long technical committee meetings.
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