New Minnesota (v3.0) Release from EdgeX Foundry

The EdgeX Foundry, which operates under the Linux Foundation’s Edge umbrella, announced the release of EdgeX 3.0, dubbed Minnesota.  EdgeX Foundry is designed to provide a highly scalable, open-source edge platform that facilitates interoperability between devices and applications at the IoT edge.

Useability is the main theme of the release.  The means by which the user configures and controls EdgeX has been significantly improved with the intent to save time when developing and deploying EdgeX Soluitions.  Other key updates include built-in microservice authentication and API upgrades.  This release will form the basis for EdgeX going forward, including the next Long Term Support (LTS) version slated for release later this year.

The EdgeX Foundry 3.0 (Minnesota) release includes the following major changes and additions since EdgeX 2.3 (Levski):

Common and Simplified Configuration of the EdgeX Services

• This is the new ability to configure key settings of EdgeX (logging, telemetry, security, database and message bus settings, etc.) in a single configuration location rather than manually applying settings across multiple microservices
• The new common configuration approach provides a layered strategy where users can configure settings common to all services or those that should only apply to the application or device services in one place

Simplify the File Formats used for EdgeX Configuration

• In EdgeX v2, different services were configured by different file formats 
• To simplify the user experience, v3 consolidates to JSON or YAML only. The TOML format has been removed

Updated V3 APIs

• This is a major release bump so the APIs are updated to include v3 endpoints.

Microservice Authentication with Vault JSON Web Tokens (JWT)

• When run in secure mode, the EdgeX microservices will now require an authentication token before they will respond to requests issued over the REST API
• The EdgeX Secret Store (Vault) now provides the tokens for each service to invoke authenticated outgoing requests to other EdgeX services

EdgeX Foundry 3.0 (Minnesota) is a major release and is therefore not backwards compatible with the previous EdgeX V2 releases.

Release Cadence

To provide EdgeX Foundry consumers with a predictable foundation on which to base their commercial offerings, a goal of EdgeX Foundry is to outline key release themes at least 12 months in advance and to plan features to be delivered in each release 6 months in advance.

Release cadence is biannual, with targets of April and October for the release months.

The source code for all EdgeX releases can be accessed on GitHub. Release branches are tagged with the associated release name (e.g., Minnesota, Levski)