Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2022 Open Source Crystal Ball - What I See For IoT and Edge Computing
By Frederic Desbiens, IoT and Edge Program
Lead for the Eclipse Foundation
In another life, I was a high school history
teacher. So for me, the best part of December is forward-looking posts trying
to predict what's ahead. After all, the whole point of studying the past is to
chart our path towards the future, right?
Last year, I published my predictions for 2021. Some of my predictions have nearly come to fruition; others are
still a work in progress. I will now try again for 2022. Of course, my
particular crystal ball is again the latest edition of the Eclipse IoT & Edge Developer Survey Report.
With that said, here are five predictions for
2022:
1.
Rust will grow on constrained devices and even in the Cloud
C is still the number 1 programming language
for constrained devices, with C++ part of the top five. There are many reasons
for that. C is fast, portable, and the cornerstone of a whole ecosystem of
tools, frameworks, and libraries. But it is not without downsides. Buffer overflow, anyone? Rust emerged as a credible alternative in the last few years since it provides
error-proof memory management and zero-cost high-level abstractions. It is even
edging closer to being accepted as a C substitute for Linux kernel development.
In our community, Eclipse zenoh is using Rust extensively. Our friends at Red Hat have also built a
constrained device and Cloud stack at the Drogue IoT project. I see those two projects coming closer in 2022, and I
suspect other Rust-based projects will appear in our ecosystem.
2.
Open-source hardware grows further
Do you know what is better than open source
software? Open source software running on open source hardware, of course! RISC-V
has seen significant momentum in the last few years, and 8% of the respondents
to our 2021 survey mentioned they use processors based on the ISA. Moreover, 6%
said they leverage chips based on the open source CORE-V designs developed by
the OpenHW Group.
I expect those numbers to grow in 2022. IoT
developers need stable, validated platforms to work with, and CORE-V delivers
just that, with flexibility that most proprietary designs simply cannot offer.
3.
The march towards software-defined
everything starts
In his remarks on the 10th anniversary of the Eclipse IoT Working
Group, Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the
Eclipse Foundation, stated that he expects developers to drop the "IoT" term at
some point. When most devices are connected, talking about the "Internet of
Things" does not make sense.
I completely agree with that statement. I
would like to propose an alternative to IoT: software-defined everything. In the past, the features of most
devices were set in stone at the factory. Most future devices will have
internet connectivity and computational power. In other words: their software
will define their abilities.
4.
5G becomes real
Telecommunication providers have been busy
building 5G infrastructure for a while now. Most high-end phones support 5G,
although they cannot use all the available frequency ranges. But you know 5G is
serious when Amazon jumps in and offers to build private 5G
networks in your factories or corporate campus.
5.
2022 is the year of Sparkplug
Committers to the Eclipse Sparkplug specification
project have worked hard throughout 2021 to take the
specification to the next level. In 2022, we will publish the first version of
the Sparkplug specification under the Eclipse Foundation Specification
Process and launch the Sparkplug compatibility
program. This will provide a robust foundation for the working group and technology
to grow. Although MQTT has been the leading IoT-specific protocol in our
developer survey for a while, the lack of interoperability in the MQTT
ecosystem is still a concern. Sparkplug changes that, which is why it will see
significant growth in 2022.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frédéric Desbiens is a program manager at the Eclipse Foundation, the
world's largest open source software foundation focused on IoT and Edge, where
he runs the organizations' efforts for IoT and Edge Computing. His job is to
help the community innovate by bringing devices and software together. In the
past, he worked as a product manager, solutions architect and developer for
companies as diverse as Pivotal, Cisco and Oracle.