Over The Edge

Dell Technologies’ Jason Shepherd joins Jonni Bidwell  in a stylish-looking stairwell in Edinburgh to talk about a de facto standard for edge computing.

- Jonni Bidwell

Jason Shepherd is a Governing Board member on the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge project, as well as CTO for IoT and Edge Computing at Dell Technologies. Back in 2018, at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit he was kind enough to spend some time to talk to Jonni Bidwell about the EdgeX Foundry project, a common open platform for computing at the edge of the IoT.

Mediating between the cloud and IoT devices is easy, but devices may lock you into proprietary edge devices or their own private clouds, and public clouds lock you in to their APIs. The challenge is to come up with open APIs which enable different hardware to interoperate and to get manufacturers to agree to use them. EdgeX Foundry has, in its short life, achieved precisely this. As it happens, EdgeX has recently celebrated its 1.0 release, which shares its codename with Scotland’s chilly capital.

That great city where once a young Jonni Bidwell was often to be found in a pub in Portobello, asking his beer and/or whisky what one is to do with an undergraduate degree in mathematics. On this occasion he and other distinguished open source luminaries enjoyed a whisky reception at Edinburgh Castle, proving conclusively that there is life after maths.

Linux Format: Hi Jason. I’m Jonni, technical editor for Linux Format – an actual paper magazine, would you believe.

Jason Shepherd: Hi Jonni. I’m Jason, CTO for IoT and Edge Computing at Dell Technologies. My role with my team is to drive our core strategy, so we look at market strategy for IoT and Edge. We own this engineered roadmap where Dell Technologies is building infrastructure, from the thin compute edge, through the mini edges to the mini clouds.