The power of collaboration and open source

Waiting for the flight coming back home … here in Stuttgart after a great Eclipse IoT Day during the EclipseCon conference in Ludwigsburg … thinking about the power of collaboration and open source …

Eclipse IoT : a big announcement

Few days ago, the Eclipse Foundation announced a collaboration between three big companies for developing the “Internet of Things” open source platform of the future under the Eclipse IoT umbrella : Red Hat, Bosch and Eurotech.

Yesterday, most of the Eclipse IoT Day sessions were focused on the projects that these companies are leading in order to build such a platform; three names that you should remember … Kura, Hono and Kapua.

From devices and gateway on the field … through the IoT connectivity at scale … to cloud services for gathering insights from data and controlling devices. You can find a lot of information about these projects on the related official web sites and public repositories so it’s not my intention digging into them in this post but just sharing my impressions about the power of collaboration and open source.

Let me just share a picture of the vision that Red Hat has about this IoT platform involving a broader ecosystem of open source projects not only from Eclipse Foundation but even from Apache Foundation.

For sure you have Eclipse IoT projects but even the Apache Qpid Dispatch Router for connectivity and messaging at scale thanks to an AMQP router network, Vert.x based microservices for handling devices connectivity and protocols translation, ActiveMQ Artemis broker for the “store and forward” needs, AMQP – Spark Streaming integration for real time analytics and finally a future Apache Kafka support.

All the best open source projects for a great IoT platform !

From closed source to … open sourcing and collaboration

For a long time I worked in a company with closed source products using … closed source products. In the spare time, I decided to start sharing my knowledge and improving it developing open source software and … I have to say … my life is changed.

From that time I gave something to the community but I received ten times what I have done. Thanks to open sourcing what I was doing, my knowledge is increased exponentially because developers all around the world were able to see my code giving me suggestions and improvements … so then the power over collaboration.

Red Hat : the Open Organization

In the world … there is only one big company based on these pillars … Red Hat !

Today, I’m so proud to be part of such a company where people can use their creativity and having fun during their work days for building open source solutions collaborating with the best developers you can ever imagine. Thanks to the “remotees”, this potential grows exponentially because talented developers can be all around the world and Red Hat searches for them every day. You can imagine that in such a context … collaboration is the pillar !

Periodically … for meetings or conferences … you have the chance to meet your colleagues in person discussing about projects you (together) are working on but even …. drinking a beer and sharing experiences … another time … collaboration !

This week was even the “We Are Red Hat Week” (WARHW … a very complex acronym). Every year a lot of activities are organized in the Red Hat offices all around the world for team building and enjoying different experiences other than working. Here in Ludwigsburg we decided to take a picture at least !

A lot of companies should take the Red Hat model … the open source and collaboration won !

Linux Day 2016 : Speaking about IoT … on the scene of the crime !

After about 10 years, Saturday October 22nd, I’ll come back on the scene of the crime !

What ? You could ask …

Next Saturday will be the Linux Day … something like a national day, here in Italy, to celebrate the open source software and all the ecosystem around it. Thanks to the NaLUG regional community, I’ll be speaker with the session “The Internet of Things … Babel” speaking about the main patterns but mostly the main protocols that are available in the IoT space.

The conference will take place at University “Federico II” in Naples where I graduated in the 2006; for this reason I’ll come back on the scene of the crime but this time on the opposite side ! I’m very excited about that !

Of course, it’s a pleasure for me helping NaLUG community and I’d like to thank them for accepting my session proposal.

You can find all the details and the agenda at this link.

Come and join us !

Node-RED : AMQP 1.0 support with the RHEA nodes library

I’m very happy to announce that I have just released the first version of a new messaging and IoT library for providing AMQP 1.0 protocol support on Node-RED that is a very interesting tool for wiring Internet of Things.

This library is based on the official JavaScript RHEA library which provides AMQP 1.0 support for NodeJS applications (developed by one of my best colleagues in Red Hat, Gordon Sim).

Up to now, the available nodes are :

• sender : for sending messages to an AMQP address
• receiver : for receiving messages from an AMQP address
• requester : for executing a request to an AMQP address and waiting a response on the address specified in the “reply-to” field
• responder : for receiving a request on an AMQP address and sending the response on the address specified in the “reply-to” field

Of course it’s open source (available on GitHub) with a getting started guide and documentation available on the related Wiki.

I published it on NPM (Node-RED is completely based on NodeJS) at following link but you can find it even on the official Node-Red web site in the flows section (searching for “amqp” for example).

Enjoying AMQP messaging and IoT with Node-RED flow programming !