EdgeX Foundry has announced the release of version 2.1 of EdgeX, codenamed Jakarta. The project’s ninth release, it follows the recent Ireland release, which was the project’s second major release (version 2.0). Jakarta is significant in that it is EdgeX’s first release to offer long term support (LTS).

The EdgeX long term support policy states that the community will work as quickly as possible and give “best effort and development priority to fix major flaws as soon as possible.”

The project has further stipulated in its LTS policy that “no new major functionality (at the discretion of the TSC) will be added” to the LTS version after the release happens.

As a part of this release cycle, EdgeX also announced a new EdgeX Developer Badge program. EdgeX has created the Developer Badge program to thank those making initial impacts to the project by providing something that they can use to highlight their efforts and volunteerism on social media platforms.

Contributors have started receiving an official digital badge (award through Credly) when they make their first contribution (their first GitHub Pull Request is accepted by the project and merged into one of the project’s code repositories); and also when they fix two documented bugs of the project. Additional badges for other work may be awarded by the community in the future.

The next EdgeX release, codenamed Kamakura, is set for Spring 2022. The community has held its semi-annual planning session to lay out the goals and objectives of this release. Kamakura is likely to be another dot-release that will again be backward compatible with all EdgeX 2.x releases (Ireland and Jakarta).