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
