Author: James Butcher, Product Manager | IOTech
At IOTech, we are delighted to announce the release of version 1.5 of the Edge Xpert Open IoT Platform. Edge Xpert is our commercially supported implementation of the Linux Foundation’s open-source EdgeX Foundry project. Aimed at Industrial IoT Edge applications, the Edge Xpert product builds upon the latest stable version of the baseline EdgeX technology, in this case, the Edinburgh release, to create a high quality and fully customer supported solution.
Providing EdgeX as a Product
The EdgeX ecosystem provides an exciting set of features for creating intelligent Edge systems but without reliable commercial support, companies are understandably reluctant to deploy open-source software into their business-critical environments. Edge Xpert delivers both an enhanced and productized implementation of EdgeX to allow our customers to use this fantastic technology with confidence. As an example, Edge Xpert productization features include:
- Enhanced implementations of the EdgeX Foundry microservices and other value-add product capabilities
- Rigorous QA processes covering a range of additional test scenarios
- Commercial release management to support on-going product life cycle management
- Software upgrades, support and maintenance with full Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
- Access to IOTech’s Professional Customer Support Organization which includes user portals, ticketing systems and knowledge bases
A Specially-Significant Release
As described here, the Edinburgh version of EdgeX is a significant milestone for the community and of course for IOTech too. The EdgeX Edinburgh release signifies that the technology is at a point where it is considered robust and ready for real-world use. After over two years of intense development, the EdgeX microservices are now feature-rich and comprehensively tested, while the APIs are stable and consistent.
Edge Xpert 1.5 uses the EdgeX Edinburgh release as the basis of the product, so the features added in the Edinburgh version are now also available in Edge Xpert.
New Features
Edge Xpert 1.5 incorporates the EdgeX enhancements provided by the Edinburgh release along with a number of additional value-add features unique to Edge Xpert.
For example, at the Device Service level, the existing Edge Xpert support for Modbus, BACnet and OPC-UA is supplemented by new Device Services for Bluetooth, Zigbee, CANopen, GPS and MEMS. At the data and analysis level, Edge Xpert provides an additional Rules Engine microservice (Node-RED), an MQTT broker (Mosquitto), a Time-Series Database (InfluxDB) and Dashboarding (Grafana). Edge Xpert also has convenient tooling for configuring and managing the system. The dedicated CLI and Management UI tools both have new features for this 1.5 release.
Please see the latest Edge Xpert Product Specification for the complete list of product features.
For more information visit Edge Xpert.
Finally, we are also working closely with a number of industrial partners to provide commercial integrations with other key software and hardware products. Stay tuned to hear about these shortly.