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

[Guest Post] Edge Computing and Open Source in Europe: A New Hope

This is a guest post by Alberto P. Martí, VP of Open Source Community Relations at OpenNebula . For everyone in the European cloud market with a passion for open source, these are exciting times. For years, tech journalists and market analysts have been predicting that edge computing was going to bring a paradigm shift to the cloud, and now we are starting to see the form that this disruption is going to take—at least in Europe. Technically speaking, there is little doubt that deploying applications and processing data at the edge comes with a number of benefits, and not only in terms of reducing latency and improving user experience. We are talking about expanding service availability to better deal with infrastructure incidents, reducing data transfers and the energy consumption and security risks associated with them, as well as minimizing vendor dependency by expanding the number of available providers. It comes as no surprise that the European Union has identified edge computing a
Post a Comment
Read more

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 the 
Post a Comment
Read more

Eclipse Amlen v1.0: A Milestone in the Growth of MQTT

Over ten years ago, the Eclipse Foundation launched the Eclipse IoT working group . MQTT was one of the pillars of that launch. The first three projects were Eclipse Paho , a collection of MQTT clients, Eclipse Mosquitto , an MQTT broker, and Eclipse Kura , a Java/OSGi solution for IoT gateways that supports the protocol. To say that MQTT is in our genes would be an understatement. Since then, usage of MQTT has grown significantly. Year after year, the simple yet powerful publish/subscribe protocol is the most widely used IoT-specific protocol in our annual developer surveys . For example, in the 2021 edition, 44% of respondents stated they are using it. We like to think we are at least partly responsible for that. By the way, our 2022 survey is currently underway; you have until June 15, 2022, to participate. Click here to share your insights after finishing this post, of course. IBM has been a key player in our MQTT ecosystem for a long time. In 2021, the company brought its commit
Post a Comment
Read more