Delivery: ~ October 2018
The Delhi release is slated to implement additional features in the security and manageability roadmap, continue to improve overall performance and establish the certification program within the EdgeX project for both commercial instances of the full platform and drop-in "EdgeX-compliant" microservices. The release will also start to look at EdgeX in a wider context use - with instances spread across a fog deployment.
Key release themes and planned features to be implemented will be detailed after the mid-year TSC Face-to-face meeing (~June 2018).
While REST will not go away (a REST API will still exist around each micro service), there may be a need to implement point-to-point messaging between select services or to adopt some type of message bus unilaterally across all of EdgeX to support messaging among services.
Messaging provides for more asynchronous communications, typically lower latency communications, and better (or more finely tuned) communication quality of service (QoS). Are there places where messaging might be more appropriate (like between core data and export distro today). Would a use case dictate the use of an alternate messaging infrastructure be used among all services with an underlying message bus to support it? Would alternate protocols (SNMP, WebSockets, etc.) be desired in some use cases? For the Delhi release, some alternate communication requirements, design and early message implementation experimentation is likely to occur.
Certification Process - want to have outlined by Delhi
Probably will include different levels of certification (micro service, versus “box”, etc.)
Provide roadmap around technical debt/refactor (what and when)
Example: Device service rewrites (ex: BLE, Bacnet)
Potentially, provide EdgeX User Interface(s)
Support additional backend integration(s) such as Watson, AWS/Greengrass, …
Support additional export feature(s)
Support additional formats (Ex: Haystack, OPC-UA, …)
Support additional endpoint types (Ex: DDS, AMQP, …)
Provide enrichment services
How best to facilitate client command requests/actuation
Expose command information north bound (export of actuation information and APIs)
More dynamic configuration
Potentially, alternate message infrastructure between some or all the services
Explore potential use of hyperledger
These items are suggestion for Delhi or later releases that have not yet been fully vetted or voted on by the TSC, but will be reviewed as part of an upcoming meeting. Items in this list may be moved to the roadmap for other releases or discarded entirely.
Command: in order to protect the device from harmful commands, there should be the possibility to set a Min and Max limit for the value that is accepted on every single command. in fact the command service today is rather a hollow simple proxy, but in the future we very much envisioned adding additional security, caching to avoid having to hit the DS when unnecessary, and even grouping command requests for better resource conservation (especially for devices like BLE that get woken up when you hit them).
Data Transformation: This is something we have always considered as a potential in EdgeX – that of a filter, even a small transformation engine between device services and core data. Not a full blown export, but something that serves in a similar fashion and was common across services. We even thought about making it some type of quick CEP/rules engine feeder for those decisions that can’t wait to go through the rest of the layers.