Open-Source IoT Edge Projects

Edge computing is a key trend this year in the IoT industry. This past week, Baidu announced a new open-source project, called OpenEdge, that targets edge computing. OpenEdge is certainly not the first open-source project for edge computing. Over the last number of years, there have been many new open-source projects started to address edge computing. Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to see how some projects are doing in terms of community and popularity.

It appears most of the projects in the survey have an active core contributor community. Most projects are supported by a main contributing company and accept PR and issues from the wider community. Over time, it will be interesting to see if one of these projects does develop a more robust open-source community of contributors.

Below is a quick summary of the open-source projects I could find on GitHub and general web searches.

Eclipse Kura

Eclipse Kura has been available for 5 years. If I am not mistaken, it was the first open-source project for edge computing. Kura is a Java/OSGi-based IoT gateway container that supports a wide variety of field protocols (ex. Modbus, OPC-UA, S7) and uses MQTT to connect with IoT cloud platforms. Eurotech is the main contributor to Kura.

Github Stats: 251 stars, 187 forks

Contributions: 36 contributors; 125 open/975 closed issues

Last month pulse: 2 authors; 3 active PR; 3 active Issues

License: Eclipse Public License

EdgeX Foundry

EdgeX was created as a Linux Foundation project in 2017. EdgeX is based on a microservices architecture and packaged as a set of Docker containers. The core runtime is developed in Go. Dell is the main contributor to EdgeX.

GitHub Stats: 270 Stars; 128 Forks

Contributions: 42 contributors; 114 open/ 359 closed issues

Last month pulse: 9 authors, 50 active PR, 58 active issues

License: Apache

StarlingX

StarlingX is a relatively new project started last year and is part of the OpenStack Foundation. StarlingX is focused on running cloud services at the edge. It is an integration of a variety of open source projects, including CentOS, OvS-DPDK, Ceph, Kubernetes, and OpenStack. The code for StarlingX is based on the code base from the Wind River Titanium Cloud

Sadly StarlingX hosts their own Git repo, so I can’t use GitHub stats.

License: Apache

OpenEdge

As mentioned previously, OpenEdge was just announced by Baidu. OpenEdge is a set of Docker containers, written Go. OpenEdge appears to be tied to Baidu’s cloud platform so it is not clear how someone would use the open source code independent of Baidu.

GitHub Stats: 647 stars; 95 forks (clearly they generated a lot of interest in a short period of time)

Contributions: 8 contributors; 11 open/ 13 closed issues (it is a new project)

Last month pulse: 6 authors; 40 active PR; 19 active issues

License: Apache

MS IoT Edge

Microsoft’s IoT Edge product is available in open source. The code is available as a set of Docker image and the main projects are written in C#. Like OpenEdge, MS IoT Edge is tied to a specific cloud platform, in this case, MS Azure IoT cloud platform.

GitHub Stats: 583 stars; 84 forks

Contributions: 25 contributors; 75 open/ 191 closed

Last month pulse: 11 authors; 51 active PR; 35 active issues

License: MIT

KubeEdge

KubeEdge is a relatively new open-source project that is focused on extending container orchestration to the edge. KubeEdge brings Kubernetes to edge nodes and then have sensors and actuators communicate with the edge nodes via MQTT. The project is written in Go. The main contributors are from Huawei.

GitHub Stats: 273 Stars; Fork 65

Contributions: 18 contributors, 10 open / 21 closed issues

Last month pulse: 11 authors; 35 active PR; 17 active issues

License: Apache

Eclipse ioFog

Eclipse ioFog is another Eclipse project that is focused on edge computing. ioFog has a microservices architecture and is deployed as Docker containers. The main contributors are from a small start-up, edgeworx.

GitHub Stats: Stars: 250; forks: 25

Contributions: 12 contributors; 0 open / 1 closed issues

Last month pulse: 4 authors; 22 active PR; 0 active issues

UPDATED — I will add new open source projects that are brought to my attention.

Macchina.io

Macchina.io provides a C++ and JavaScript SDK for edge devices. It is run by a small company called Applied Informatics Software Engineering.

GitHub Stats: 358 Stars; 114 forks

Contributions: 8 contributors; 26 open/ 50 closed issues

Last month pulse: 1 author; 0 active PR; 1 active issue

License: Apache

Disclaimer: Dell is a client; My former employer was the Eclipse Foundation, and I was active with the Eclipse IoT projects.