News

Eclipse IoT Group Unveils New Kura, Kapua and Open Testbeds

• By John K. Waters
• May 10, 2017

The Eclipse Foundation's Internet of Things (IoT) Working Group released a new version of its Kura IoT framework last week, announced the first milestone release of its Kapua platform and announced the creation of a new initiative to drive the adoption of IoT open source and open standards.

Eclipse Kura is an open source, Java/OSGi-based framework for building IoT gateways. Version 3.0, available now, comes with new features designed for so-called IoT edge computing.

Edge computing allows data to be processed nearer the source—out at the edges of the network—and it's quickly becoming a preferred architecture for running data-driven apps. IoT edge computing pushes data management and analysis from the cloud out to IoT gateways. Individual devices connect to these gateways, rather than the cloud, and the gateways manage, analyze and forward the data to an IoT cloud service.

Eclipse Kura provides IoT developers and solution providers with the services needed to build IoT gateways. Kura 3.0 adds features that simplify interoperability, connectivity and hardware integration, which were the top three areas of concern surfaced in a recent Eclipse IoT Developer survey.

The IoT Working Group also announced the first milestone release of Eclipse Kapua, a modular platform designed to provide the services required to manage IoT gateways and smart edge devices. Kapua M1 provides a core integration framework and a basic set of core IoT services, including a device registry, device management services, messaging services, data management and application enablement.

Kapua can be combined with Kura to provide an integrated IoT foundation, the Working Group said in a statement. Together they provide "an end-to-end, open-source foundation for IoT projects and applications," the Group said.

The Group also announced Eclipse IoT Open Testbeds, a collaboration among commercial vendors and open source communities to "demonstrate and test commercial and open source component needed to create specific industry solutions." Each IoT Testbed will deliver a running solution and make its source code available under an open source license.

The Working Group debuted its first testbed at the recent Red Hat Summit in Boston. Red Hat lead the first project, which focused on asset tracking management. Azul Systems, Eurotech, Samsung, and Codenvy participated in the project. This first testbed showcased several Eclipse IoT projects, including Eclipse Kura, Eclipse Kapua and Eclipse Paho.

"The innovation required by enterprise IoT cannot be done in siloed, isolated projects; rather, it requires collaboration across an entire community to achieve a common goal," said James Kirkland, chief IoT architect at Red Hat, in a statement. "The Eclipse IoT Open Testbeds initiative helps to address this need by encouraging joint work on open, standards-based IoT projects. It's an effort that will be critical to the future success of IoT in the enterprise, and an endeavor that Red Hat is very happy to support."

The Eclipse IoT Working Group is a collaborative effort to create open source software for IoT solutions. Eclipse IoT is made up of more than 30 member companies and currently comprises 28 open source projects.