Today is the day we’ve been waiting for: The OpenFog Consortium has announced its reference architecture. You can find it here. This is the culmination of a year’s work by lots of dedicated engineers in our 55 member-organizations, which include both companies and universities. Why is the reference architecture important? It sets the framework for secure inter-operable products to be built making use of the computing, networking and storage resources located between the cloud and the edge.
OpenFog is especially well suited to applications that require ultra-low latency, high network bandwidth, resource constraints and added security. It is also an answer to a nagging question: How are we going to be able to manage the zetabytes of data expected from IoT devices on our network infrastructure? The way we are currently deploying IoT, with many things connected directly to the cloud, is not the answer, but OpenFog is.
We are hearing about more and more reasons for edge computing, latency, privacy, and network cost--to name a few. Fog brings edge to the next level. Fog incorporates the resources between the edge and the cloud in a dynamic way. It makes use of the many computing, networking and storage resources that used to be network specific. Now--because of network functional virtualization (NFV)--
these resources can be useful to other applications. The fact that 55 organizations worked together on this reference architecture will make it quicker and easier for companies to adopt OpenFog. However, the work is not yet done. There are more use cases to consider, standards to be made, and testbeds to run to increase the usefulness of this framework.
If you want to hear more about OpenFog and are going to be at Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, come hear me talk about it. I’ll present the opportunities that lie ahead for designers and use some examples to illustrate the concepts. The details are attached in the PDF below. To register, send an email to danni.coffey@arm.com. If you aren’t going to be at MWC, the OpenFog website is another great resource.