New Training Course Aims to Make It Easy to Get Started With EdgeX Foundry

By AIT News Desk On Jul 1, 2020

Course explains what EdgeX Foundry is, how it works, how to use it in your edge solutions, leveraging the support of LF Edge’s large ecosystem

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the availability of a new training course, LFD213 – Getting Started with EdgeX Foundry.

LFD213, was developed in conjunction with LF Edge, an umbrella organization under The Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system. The course is designed for IoT and/or edge software engineers, system administrators, and operation technology technicians that want to assemble an edge solution.

The course covers how EdgeX Foundry is architected, how to download and run it, and how to configure and extend the EdgeX framework when needed. The four chapters of the course, which take approximately 15 hours to complete, provide a basic overview, a discussion of device services, which connect physical sensors and devices to the rest of platform, application services, how to send data from EdgeX to enterprise applications, cloud systems, external databases, or even analytics packages, and more.

Hands-on labs enable students to get and run EdgeX and play with some of its important APIs, as well as create a simple service (either device or application service) and integrate it into the rest of EdgeX.

EdgeX Foundry is an open-source, vendor-neutral, hardware- and OS-agnostic IoT/edge computing software platform that is a Stage 3 (Impact) project under LF Edge. In the simplest terms, it is edge middleware that sits between operational technology, physical sensing “things” and information technology systems. It facilitates getting sensor data from any “thing” protocol to any enterprise application, cloud system or on-premise database. At the same time, the EdgeX platform offers local/edge analytics to be able to offer low latency decision making at the edge to actuate back down onto sensors and devices. Its microservice architecture and open APIs allow for 3rd parties to provide their own replacement or augmenting components and add additional value to the platform. In short, EdgeX Foundry provides the means to build edge solutions more quickly and leverage the support of a large ecosystem of companies that participate in edge computing.

“EdgeX Foundry is on a phenomenal growth trajectory with multiple releases and millions of container downloads,” said Jim White, EdgeX Foundry Chair of the Technical Steering Committee and CTO of IOTech Systems. “Given the scale of the adopting community and ecosystem, it is critical that there is proper training available to allow new adopters and prospective users to learn how to get started. The new training, created by the architects of EdgeX Foundry and managed by The Linux Foundation, will allow developers exploring EdgeX a faster and better path to understand and work with EdgeX while also accelerating our project’s adoption at scale.”