Wind River calls itself the intelligent edge software company, an epithet presumably meant to make us think about not just smart IoT devices, but ones with increasingly remote processing and analytical abilities. This is not just the edge, this is the near-edge to far-edge with spanning cloud-to-edge and edge-to-cloud
In its efforts to smarten up the planet’s global edge compute estate, the company has now introduced eLxr Pro, a commercial (a polite way of saying paid-for) enterprise Linux offering engineered for the specific needs of cloud-to-edge deployments.
Debian-Based
In terms of this technology’s progeny, eLxr Pro is based on the open source eLxr project, the recently launched Debian-based distribution that targets enterprise AI and industry-specific workloads and use cases.
Why Debian? As Wind River itself has stated, “Debian encourages the creation of new distributions and derivatives such as eLxr.” The project’s stewards say that this helps expand its reach into new use cases and that Debian sees sharing experiences with derivatives as a way to expand the community, improve the code for the existing users and make Debian suitable for a more diverse audience.
As the eLxr central mission statement confirms, “The greater processing requirements of the edge are fueling a need for a hardened, sector-specific near-edge server solution — the right fit to address the unique needs and synergies of the edge.” Expanding the company’s industry-leading Linux portfolio, eLxr Pro delivers long-term commercial support and services to the open source eLxr project distribution.
Specifically, Industry-Specific
It’s easy for vendors to list a usual suspects roll call of industry verticals with retail, manufacturing and utilities all nicely checked off. Wine River has provided rather more color and said that eLxr Pro enables organizations challenged with high-performance edge and enterprise needs to meet stringent performance and operational requirements for the next generation of commercial deployments across a wide range of emerging use cases for autonomous vehicles, aerospace, defense, energy, finance, medical, industrial automation, smart cities and telecommunications.
“There is an industry need for a true open source offering not controlled by a corporate entity, but with the option for a highly scaled, reputable business to support the distribution. eLxr Pro offers the industry a robust and differentiated option, backed by an industry-leading open-source solutions provider,” said Avijit Sinha, president of Wind River.
It’s Free… and Commercial!
With eLxr Pro, Sinha assures customers deploying next-generation near-edge and enterprise server solutions that they will be “empowered to innovate” using a free, open-source distribution optimized for performance, security and ease of use. He further notes that these users can do so with confidence, knowing it is backed by commercial enterprise support and professional services.
Was that ebullient glee for both “free” and “commercial” sat slightly too close together? Only a naysayer would offer such critique, Wind River has pledged to address issues directly stemming from enterprise open-source platforms and is not afraid to say why.
“Enterprise supplier disruptions, such as the CentOS [went] end-of-life in June 2024, [which] has forced CIOs to reevaluate their Linux vendors. Current options are often either too limiting or overly complex, leading to implementations that do not meet the dynamic demands of this rapidly evolving segment.
Radical New Edge Requirements
The company says that this reevaluation trend is driving the demand for cloud-to-edge solutions that efficiently manage complex workloads, such as rapid data processing and AI and machine learning by reusing core operating system components and common code base and frameworks.
All of which, on paper if not in practice, could help us to address the challenges of optimizing and deploying near and far edge applications to process data closer to where it is generated. This is technology designed for workloads that involve and require remote automatic updates, containerized application functionality (and of course a commensurate level of orchestration) alongside other sophisticated functions including AI inference, machine learning and autonomous operations.
