Edge Native Working Group launches from the Eclipse Foundation

The Eclipse Foundation has announced the launch of the Edge Native Working Group, a vendor-neutral and code-first industry collaboration that will drive the evolution and broad adoption of open source software for edge computing. With edge computing code from the foundation already deployed in production environments, the Edge Native Working Group is focused on the near-term creation of an end-to-end software stack that will support deployments of today’s most transformative technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles, and more. Founding members of the Edge Native Working Group include ADLINK, Bosch, Edgeworx, Eurotech, Huawei, Intel, Kynetics, and Siemens. 

“Edge computing has emerged over the past few years as the way to process data and deliver services for AI, autonomous vehicles, 5G, IoT, and important industrial use cases by leveraging distributed, localized compute. Within the Eclipse community, we already have a mature code base of open source edge computing platforms with production deployments in the field. The Eclipse Foundation is happy to host this vendor-neutral industry collaboration to accelerate the adoption of distributed applications at the edge,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation.

Edge computing, a distributed computing architecture that brings compute power and storage physically closer to applications in order to improve performance and increase efficiency, is forecast to generate a market worth $16.5 billion within the next five years (Allied Market Research, 2019). The Eclipse Foundation already hosts production-ready code that enables developers to quickly build, deploy, and manage applications at the edge at enterprise scale.

The working group’s purview will encompass the two flagship projects currently at the Eclipse Foundation including Eclipse ioFog and Eclipse fog05, as well as other projects that are yet to be announced. In addition to the code that the Eclipse Foundation has already released, the Edge Native Working Group will focus on the development of various layers of software at the network edge that will enable others to build customized applications for their own specific implementations. This includes applications for retail, carrier environments, 5G, IoT, and Industry 4.0 or smart manufacturing deployments. Regardless of the applications needed, the Edge Native Working Group will help to solve the challenges endemic to edge computing; a heterogeneous hardware landscape, low bandwidth, latency, limited power, and security.

“The Eclipse Foundation is doing the same thing for edge computing that it did for IoT. We’re acknowledging that edge computing has its own requirements, challenges, and industry-wide concerns that are different from those found in all other sectors. There’s enough going on in the industry that it’s time to address the particular challenges associated with edge computing in a very focused way,” said Kilton Hopkins, co-founder, and CEO of Edgeworx, Inc. and Eclipse ioFog project lead.

The Eclipse Foundation has a proven track record of enabling developer-focused open source software collaboration and innovation earned over 15 years. The Foundation’s IoT community alone represents one of the largest open-source collaborations in the world spanning 41 projects from more than 40 members and over 4 million lines of code produced. Overall, the Foundation’s more than 370 collaborative projects have resulted in over 195 million lines of code — a $10 billion shared investment.

The Eclipse Foundation will also be showcasing the Edge Native Working Group at the Edge Computing World conference, taking place in San Jose, California at the Computer History Museum from Monday, December 9 through Thursday, December 12.

Quotes from Eclipse Edge Native Working Group Members 

ADLINK

“Edge Native technologies are an instrumental enabler for the next wave of innovations in telecommunications, transportation, energy, robotics, and IoT in general. The Eclipse Foundation’s Edge Native Working Group will have a pivotal role in establishing the open-source Edge Native reference platform and, as such, accelerate the adoption of edge native architectures. ADLINK is thrilled to be part of this team — let’s shape the future of Edge Computing together,” said Angelo Corsaro, Ph.D., CTO at ADLINK Technologies Inc.

Bosch

“The Eclipse Edge Native Working Group provides an excellent opportunity for Bosch to collaborate on standard technology for implementing solutions in this trending market segment. We consider this to be a logical next step in addition to our ongoing efforts within the Eclipse IoT Working Group,” said Stefan Ferber, CEO, Bosch Software Innovations.

Eurotech

“Whether it's healthcare, energy, transportation or Industry 4.0, edge computing is transforming the way data is processed and acted upon to deliver innovative services across myriad industries. As a founding member of the Eclipse IoT Working Group, we're excited to contribute to this new initiative of the Eclipse Foundation and to shape the future of edge technology. The Edge Native Working Group will help to drive open collaboration and speed adoption for the entire ecosystem,” said Marco Carrer, Eurotech's CTO.

Kynetics

“The creation of this edge computing-focused working group is an important step forward for the industry and in particular for us and our next OS products. One important innovation that edge computing is bringing to the industry is its agnostic-distributed deployment model. That model will be a great step ahead for embedded systems. I have no doubt the Edge Native Working Group will have as much visibility and market presence in developing and shipping great code as the Eclipse Foundation has had with the IoT. We look forward to collaborating with our fellow members to support this important market,” said Nicola La Gloria, CEO of Kynetics.

Huawei

“Building a strong open ecosystem community for the emerging geo-distributed Edge Native platform is fundamentally important to the success of IoT across various industry sectors,” said Evan Xiao, vice president, Strategy and Industry Development, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. “While edge devices are heterogeneous and domain-specific, they share much common decentralized software characteristics towards IT, CT, and OT convergence. We are thrilled to participate in the Eclipse Edge Native Working Group  as contributors to building a unified open distributed edge framework for discovering, sharing, and moving data, as well as storage, analytics, and governance across heterogeneous clients, edges, and clouds.”