News

Eclipse Foundation Launches Edge-Native Working Group

• By John K. Waters
• December 11, 2019

The Eclipse Foundation launched a new working group this week focused on edge computing. Described as "a vendor-neutral and code-first industry collaboration," the new Edge Native Working Group was created to drive the evolution and broad adoption of open source software for edge computing, the Foundation says.

"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," said the Foundation's executive director Mike Milinkovich, in a statement. "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."

The Foundation unveiled the new working group at the EDGE Computing World conference, currently underway at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

The distributed architecture called edge computing is transforming the way data is handled, processed, and delivered from millions of devices that are distant from a datacenter by bringing the compute power and storage physically closer to the application. The industry watchers at Allied Market Research expect the edge computing market to be worth $16.5 billion within the next five years.

This isn't the Foundation's first work with computing at the edge. The independent, not-for-profit steward of the Eclipse open-source software development community already hosts production-ready code designed to enable devs to build, deploy, and manage edge apps at enterprise scale. But the working group provides an organized focus on the edge.

The new working group already has two flagship projects: Eclipse ioFog, which provides a complete edge computing platform, including all the pieces needed to build and run apps at the edge at enterprise scale; and Eclipse fog05, a proposed project that provides "a decentralized infrastructure that unifies computing, networking, and storage fabrics end-to-end, while addressing the challenges imposed by resource heterogeneity. The Foundation says it has other edge compute project in the pipeline that are yet to be announced.

"The Eclipse Foundation is doing the same thing for edge computing that it did for IoT," said Edgeworx CEO and ioFog project lead Kilton Hopkins, in a statement. "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."

More information about how to participate in the new working group is available on the Foundation's website. Devs can also sign up for the mailing list.