News

Eclipse Kapua IoT Project Gets Code from Eurotech and Red Hat

• By John K. Waters
• October 26, 2016

The nascent Eclipse Kapua project got a big boost this week from its chief sponsors, open source solutions provider Red Hat and M2M/IoT platform provider Eurotech. The two companies announced their first official code contributions to the recently approved project, through which they are developing a modular, cloud-based platform for managing IoT gateways and smart edge devices. Red Hat and Eurotech collaborated to propose the project last June.

The Eclipse Kapua project aims to bridge the gap between Operation Technology (OT) -- the physical world of IoT devices, including manufacturing processes and software for controlling and monitoring plants and equipment -- and Information Technology (IT). That gap is closing, the project's contributors believe, but it needs an integration platform. Kapua "focuses on providing comprehensive management of edge IoT nodes, including their connectivity, configuration and application life cycle," supporters wrote in their project proposal.

In other words, Kapua aims to provide a core integration framework and an initial set of services for device registry, device management, message routing, data management and application enablement. The Kapua framework would help to address the primary challenges of managing an IoT infrastructure, including connectivity, configuration and embedded application life cycle. It would also make it possible to aggregate real-time data streams from the edge and archive them, or route them towards enterprise IT systems and applications.

Kapua can be combined with Eclipse Kura, a Java/OSGi-based container for M2M applications running in service gateways, which was initiated as an Eclipse project by Eurotech. Together the two frameworks provide an integrated IoT foundation -- what the project organizers describe as an open source end-to-end solution for IoT apps "from the edge gateway to the world of IT."

Based in Italy, Eurotech is a provider of embedded boards, systems and software. The company is contributing the code from its own IoT Integration Platform to the Kapua project. Its Everyware Cloud and Everyware Software Framework products are based on Kapua and Kura, respectively.

"The richness of the Eclipse Kapua project, with its modular integration platform for IoT devices and sensors, enhances the overall Eclipse IoT offering," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, when the project was announced. "Kapua is tightly connected to several Eclipse IoT projects and with the leadership of Red Hat, Eurotech and other project contributors, the Eclipse IoT offering continues to drive innovation in the Internet of Things and make new applications possible."