THE RAZOR’S EDGE

Erik Nordmark is one of the co-founders and the chief architect at Zededa, pioneers in edge virtualisation and creators of Project EVE – the Edge Virtualization Engine.

For anyone that doesn’t buy into new computing paradigms, Erik claims “the edge is already here, it’s just not connected yet.” And he would know. He also sits on the technical advisory committee of the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge umbrella organisation (https://lfedge.org), which brings together seven (and counting) projects, including Project EVE (and EdgeX Foundries, which we heard about in LXF257). LF Edge has the lofty goal of establishing an open, interoperable framework for edge computing.

Erik was brave enough to join Jonni Bidwell among the clouds on the roof of the Lyon convention centre – skirting dangerously close to all kinds of appalling edge/cloud punnery, but escaping with only a tasteful nod to W. Somerset Maugham’s lukewarm classic.

Linux Format: What sort of things are you working on at Zededa?

Erik Nordmark: What I care about is driving edge technology, but there’s scary stuff that goes along with that. We’ve seen many home products that ship with default usernames and passwords. How can we advance the state of the art [tech] so that people can deploy these things and still be able to sleep at night? We want the people who have the domain expertise – retail, energy, healthcare, whatever – they worry about their applications, they don’t worry about how to make Linux secure.

When we set up Zededa [in 2016] we found you could buy a $7 Orange Pi board with 256MB of RAM and boot the Xen hypervisor on that. So