I am delighted today to announce that Sparkplug won an IoT Edge Computing Excellence Award from IoT Evolution! This achievement underscores the growing maturity of the specification and its relevance to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. Congratulations to the committers and contributors of the Sparkplug specification project!
From the announcement:
This award recognizes the companies emerging as leaders in the growing edge computing space. Companies selected for this award have proven that their products are enabling advanced IoT deployments by offering edge solutions that bring real-time computing, data availability, analytics, AI and machine learning to edge devices.
Edge Nodes play a fundamental role in Sparkplug. Version 3.0 of the specification defines them as any MQTT Client application that manages an MQTT Session and provides the physical or logical gateway functions required to participate in the Sparkplug topic namespace and leverage its payload definitions. Sparkplug Edge Nodes are responsible for any local protocol interface to existing devices such as PLCs, RTUs, Flow Computers, and Sensors. They also take care of any local discrete I/O, and any logical internal process variables (PVs) involved.
The figure below illustrates Sparkplug's architecture.
As you can see, Sparklug-enabled devices and software components are completely decoupled from each other. On the other hand, Sparkplug Edge of Network nodes aggregate the traffic relevant to the devices attached to them.
Did you know that IoT Edge Computing Excellence Awards are not new to the IoT and Edge Computing community at Eclipse? Eclipse ioFog, an industry-leading edge container orchestration platform, won such the award back in 2020.
