Skip to main content

Three Things I Hope to Learn From the 2021 Eclipse IoT and Edge Developer Survey

The 2021 edition of the Eclipse IoT & Edge Developer Survey is underway. This is the seventh edition of the survey, which over the years has become one of the most widely referenced technical surveys within the IoT & edge computing community.

Back in July, strategic members of the Eclipse IoT, Edge Native and Sparkplug working groups were overhauling the survey. As a result, I sincerely think this is our best survey yet, and I am excited about our upcoming report on the results, which we intend to publish in November.

As usual, the survey results will be chock-full of insights. Here are three questions to which I look forward to seeing answers.

How are developers leveraging edge gateways and edge servers?

In past editions of the survey, we have asked developers which languages they use and which workloads they deploy on edge nodes. This year, we made this question more granular as we split edge nodes into edge gateways and edge servers. What is the distinction, you ask? An edge gateway acts as the aggregation point for a group of sensors and actuators to coordinate the connectivity of these devices to each other and an external network. On the other hand, an edge server can run multiple workloads and is, by design, meant to offer workload consolidation at the edge.

Given their distinct purposes, I would expect some differences in the way developers configure edge gateways and edge servers. I hope the survey results will shed some light on this question.

Sparkplug is on the rise, but by how much?

Year after year, our respondents have selected MQTT as the number one option among protocols specific to IoT. This is no surprise. MQTT is mature and proven. The Eclipse Paho and Eclipse Mosquitto projects are fantastic client and broker implementations, respectively. And with Eclipse Amlen, there will now be an open-source option for those looking for a highly available broker that supports clustering.

What makes MQTT great is that it is very flexible since the specification does not define the message payloads. However, this flexibility comes at the price of interoperability. Fortunately, there is Eclipse  Sparkplug, a protocol that leverages MQTT as its transport. By defining standard payloads and topic structures, Sparkplug makes MQTT-based infrastructure interoperable out of the box. 

The 2020 edition of the survey found significant adoption for Sparkplug. One year later, I am pretty sure it has seen substantial growth. The only question is: by how much?

How are CORE-V and RISC-V impacting the industry?

Even Apple recently posted jobs related to RISC-V. So I am confident we'll see some growth for the open source ISA this year. However, given the current market share of ARM-based SOCs and MCUs, I am unsure how RISC-V's current momentum will translate into our IoT and Edge community.

We added the CORE-V family of RISC-V cores to our questions about CPUs for constrained devices and edge gateways/servers for the first time. Our friends at OpenHW Group have been busy working on their open source cores, and it will be interesting to explore its impact on the developer community further.

Make your voice heard

The 2021 edition of the Eclipse IoT and Edge Developer Survey will be open until October 5, 2021. As usual, we will publish our findings under a Creative Commons license to benefit the open source community at large. Please complete the survey now and make your voice heard!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eclipse IDE for Embedded Developers Now Runs on the Raspberry Pi!

The Eclipse IDE is the project that started it all for the Eclipse Foundation . From the beginning, Eclipse IDE was meant to run on multiple platforms; it now supports Linux, Mac OS and Microsoft Windows. Since it is written in Java, it also supports multiple processor architectures. However, support for 32-bit architectures has been dropped in version 2018-12. This meant recent versions of the IDE would not run on the Raspberry Pi anymore. The introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 in June 2019 gave hope to Eclipse on Pi fans. With its 64-bit quad core ARM Cortex-A72, the Pi 4 was a good hardware platform to work with. It became even more attractive in May 2020, with the introduction of the 8Gb variant. The Eclipse community took notice of those developments. Version 2020-09 of Eclipse IDE now ships with experimental support for 64-bit ARM (aarch64) on Linux.  Those developments mean embedded and IoT developers can now work on the Raspberry Pi 4 by installing the plugins provided by ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Eclipse ThreadX: Charting our course for 2025

On November 21, 2023, Microsoft announced that it was contributing Azure RTOS to the Eclipse Foundation, which gave birth to the Eclipse ThreadX project . Since then, the project team and Eclipse Foundation staff have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to transition ThreadX to a true community-driven open source project and ensure its continued certification for safety-critical applications. In this short post, I will review the major milestones of that first year and share what to expect from the team in 2025. ThreadX v6.4.1 On February 28, 2024, the ThreadX project released version 6.4.1 of ThreadX and its companion modules. This release, the first made under the Eclipse Foundation development process, completed the transition of ThreadX to open source. From a technical standpoint, there were no changes from the prior 6.4.0 release. And yet, v6.4.1 represents a significant milestone. The Eclipse Foundation intends to certify ThreadX v6.4.1 for safety-critical applications. Yo...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Robotic Dream Team: ROS 2 and Cyclone DDS

The Eclipse Cyclone DDS team has been hard at work recently ; this got them noticed in a big way. Open Robotics recently declared that Eclipse Cyclone DDS will be a tier one middleware in ROS 2 Foxy Fitzroy! Eclipse Cyclone DDS, an implementation of the Data Distribution Service standard under the stewardship of the DDS Foundation and the Object Management Group (OMG), is a project of the Eclipse IoT and OpenADx working groups. Some of the key benefits of Cyclone DDS include: Secure ROS 2 (SROS2) integration & testing contributed by Eclipse IoT member Canonical .  Implementation of DDS Security contributed, tested, optimized and ready for ROS users. The team backported this feature to the ROS 2 Dashing and Eloquent releases! Full coverage of QoS supported by ROS including lifespan and deadline  New high-speed RMW serializer contributed by Rover Robotics Ability to discover a single robot among a swarm of 1,000+ (thanks to iRobot for the use case!) Too many performan...
Post a Comment
Read more