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THIS IS DRAFT AND NOT TO BE USED AT THIS TIME. This is in DEVELOPMENT.

What is EdgeX Foundry and why use it?

EdgeX Foundry is the future.

EdgeX Foundry is a versatile, flexible, open-source Edge and Cloud software, with plug-and-play architecture to enable you to utilize the variety of components already created for EdgeX Foundry, to customize them, or to create your own components as you need them under an Apache 2 license.

The appeal of EdgeX Foundry is its simplicity. The architectural "structure" is created by the linking of the microsystems to each other.

In addition, a large amount of work has been completed so that you, or other members of the open source community, can add other specific microservices that are not included in EdgeX Foundry today, due to licensing.

EdgeX Foundry has a microservice-based architecture and performs the following activities:

Collects data from the “south side,” by communicating with the physical IoT devices and sensors
Transforms and packages data for the “north side,” and communicates the data to the Enterprise data storage, enterprise analytics, and intelligence engines
Moves data north, laterally, or south as needed
Provides a small amount of intelligence or analytics (rule engines, CEP, limited machine learning) at the edge of the network to provide early detection and warning capability
Enables third parties (partners, vendors, customers, and so forth) to provide, replace, or augment their own solutions within the stack

At this time, EdgeX Foundry is not alone connecting to the Internet of Things (IoT). Why use EdgeX Foundry instead of something else, and what are the advantages?

Flexibility: EdgeX Foundry is polyglottic enabling Developers to develop components in any software language and not be limited to only one language, such as Java. Other software connecting to IoT is not as flexible and requires Developers to use specific programming languages.
Usability: EdgeX Foundry provides the Software Development Kit (SDK) to provide scaffolding to get you started.
Reliability: EdgeX Foundry is unique because it is supported by a wide array of reliable, established companies. Some other open source IoT software does not have the support of such an array of high-tech industry leaders.

Architectural Tenets

EdgeX Foundry has the following attributes:

Hardware independent (Intel, Arm, and so forth)
OS independent (Windows, Linux, *nix, and so forth)
Flexible deployment models (virtualization, containerization, local, cloud, and so forth)
Microservices everywhere for everything--independently developed, deployed, updated modules of the gateway software and reduction of single points of failure
Productivity over technology--select your programming language (polyglottic), select your framework
Best practices solutions
EdgeX Foundry supports the ecosystem (any microservice can be replaced by a better microservice or another microservice that better supports a particular use case)

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