ApacheCon and Edgent

[Dale LaBossiere <dl...@apache.org>]

Hi all,

Will and I attended ApacheCon 2017 and gave a talk “Video Analytics at the Edge: Fun with Apache Edgent, OpenCV and a Raspberry Pi”.

Here’s my take on the conference wrt Edgent:

Overall, I think it was very good for raising awareness of / interest in Edgent.
- we had our talk right after lunch on the first day.
    The room was pretty full - ~50 people?  seemed to go well.
    The next day an attendee approached me at breakfast and said he found the talk
    to be the most interesting to him so far.
- Will, a brave guy, did an Edgent presentation in the “Apache Shark Tank” session
- Will also did a 5min “Lightening Talk” plug for Edgent
- We noticed a few folks with the Edgent website open on their laptops
- Edgent was now getting mentioned in some other talks later in week
    - Building a SCADA system
    - Verbal mention in Transportation IoT stack talk
    - I plugged it the “Ignite & Spark” talk
    - While mentioned in the “Apache and RPi” talk’s abstract, the author hadn’t yet played with it
- Will had a chat with some OpenWisk folks re being able integrate an Edgent app with openwork
- We had a chat with Mynewt folks.  There seems to be an integration opportunity - e.g., Edgent app running on an IoT gateway ingesting events from connected Mynewt-based sensors.
- We had a discussion with John Ament regarding the project as a whole.  More to come there.

That said, most of the ApacheIoT talks showing (Apache) IoT stacks showed devices ~directly connected to the data center, ingesting “raw” sensor reading values into Kafka, and such and going up the stack from there.  The talks were mostly at the “data center” components level, sometimes focusing on ingest volume/speed.  Don’t think I heard / saw anyone mention explicitly concentrating devices into an IoT Gateway.

There were some lower level IoT talks on Mynewt (RTOS and environment for micro controller sized devices), Juston’s OpenSource HW talk, Justin’s “Become a [device level] IoT Developer” talk.

A couple of interesting slides/comments in a (VC) Keynote speaker’s IoT presentation:
  Macro trends
        Exponential growth in devices
        Exploding data volume
        Smarter “things”, lower cost
        Realtime Machine-2-Machine, no human in the loop
  Hence
        Realtime, Streaming
        Event Driven
        Running on the Edge
  Summary
         Early days in a large mkt
         Real use cases are (finally) emerging
         Tech stack is mature
         Investors are cautiously optimistic

— Dale

Re: ApacheCon and Edgent

[William Marshall <wc...@gmail.com>]

Hi Dale, thanks for the summary.

Just thought I'd add a few more points of interest during the event:
- I spoke with Sally Khudairi, the head of marketing at Apache. She said a
good way to raise awareness about Edgent is to create a blog under
blogs.apache.org and to start posting articles about Edgent. We can do this
by requesting infra for both the subdomain domain and access. Her advice,
in addition to John's, was that we should have examples of integrating into
other Apache projects; examples of Spark, Apex, and Flink would be good
starting points.
- One question after the 50 minute Edgent talk was about whether Edgent had
any lifecycle support, as in, if there's a way to update a currently
running Edgent app to a newer version.
- I went to a talk by Carlos Santana about OpenWhisk. He mentioned they're
thinking about adding integration with NodeRed to execute topologies
through OpenWhisk (still unclear as to exactly what that means), so I asked
whether such integration with Edgent were possible, and he seemed open to
the idea. Carlos is an OpenWhisk committer and IBMer.
- During one of the introductory Keynotes, Edgent was mentioned as one of
the contributed IBM projects.
- To expand on what Dale said, we had a talk with two MyNewt contributors,
one is Aditi Hilbert (a committer), and the other is James Pace (ceo of
runtime). They expressed an interest in some form of Edgent integration.
MyNewt is a real time OS which can run on natively on small
microprocessors, but it can also run as a VM in a gateway, so there's some
opportunity to have Edgent communicate with MyNewt in a gateway.

Smaller points of interest:
- Jim Jagilski, one of the Shark Tank judges, said he wouldn't be surprised
if we had a "floodgates opening" kind of moment. The project should have
more attention that it does given its position in the IoT space. Pretty
encouraging!

For me, the takeaway with respect to outreach was that we should be writing
articles on the Apache blog about how we can integrate with different
Apache projects.

-Will


On Tue, May 23, 2017 at 9:29 AM, Dale LaBossiere <dl...@apache.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Will and I attended ApacheCon 2017 and gave a talk “Video Analytics at the
> Edge: Fun with Apache Edgent, OpenCV and a Raspberry Pi”.
>
> Here’s my take on the conference wrt Edgent:
>
> Overall, I think it was very good for raising awareness of / interest in
> Edgent.
> - we had our talk right after lunch on the first day.
>     The room was pretty full - ~50 people?  seemed to go well.
>     The next day an attendee approached me at breakfast and said he found
> the talk
>     to be the most interesting to him so far.
> - Will, a brave guy, did an Edgent presentation in the “Apache Shark Tank”
> session
> - Will also did a 5min “Lightening Talk” plug for Edgent
> - We noticed a few folks with the Edgent website open on their laptops
> - Edgent was now getting mentioned in some other talks later in week
>     - Building a SCADA system
>     - Verbal mention in Transportation IoT stack talk
>     - I plugged it the “Ignite & Spark” talk
>     - While mentioned in the “Apache and RPi” talk’s abstract, the author
> hadn’t yet played with it
> - Will had a chat with some OpenWisk folks re being able integrate an
> Edgent app with openwork
> - We had a chat with Mynewt folks.  There seems to be an integration
> opportunity - e.g., Edgent app running on an IoT gateway ingesting events
> from connected Mynewt-based sensors.
> - We had a discussion with John Ament regarding the project as a whole.
> More to come there.
>
> That said, most of the ApacheIoT talks showing (Apache) IoT stacks showed
> devices ~directly connected to the data center, ingesting “raw” sensor
> reading values into Kafka, and such and going up the stack from there.  The
> talks were mostly at the “data center” components level, sometimes focusing
> on ingest volume/speed.  Don’t think I heard / saw anyone mention
> explicitly concentrating devices into an IoT Gateway.
>
> There were some lower level IoT talks on Mynewt (RTOS and environment for
> micro controller sized devices), Juston’s OpenSource HW talk, Justin’s
> “Become a [device level] IoT Developer” talk.
>
> A couple of interesting slides/comments in a (VC) Keynote speaker’s IoT
> presentation:
>   Macro trends
>         Exponential growth in devices
>         Exploding data volume
>         Smarter “things”, lower cost
>         Realtime Machine-2-Machine, no human in the loop
>   Hence
>         Realtime, Streaming
>         Event Driven
>         Running on the Edge
>   Summary
>          Early days in a large mkt
>          Real use cases are (finally) emerging
>          Tech stack is mature
>          Investors are cautiously optimistic
>
> — Dale