Show HN: Project Eve – Edge Virtualization Engine

Since I'm one of the original EVE's authors, let me start by saying this: EVE is different from Balena in two fundamental ways: 1. EVE believes in Edge Virtualization (hardware assisted virtualization) as the only way to build secure-by-default edge computing systems 2. EVE supports a variety of workloads (VMs, Unikernels and Docker/OCI containers) and we’re in a process of defining a spec for this called Edge Containers You can read more about EVE's architecture (and please let us know if anything is not clear so we can improve our documentation) here: https://github.com/lf-edge/eve/blob/master/docs/README.md)

Honestly, I think #2 is the most exciting part of EVE and there’s an evolving doc here: https://github.com/lf-edge/eve/blob/master/docs/ECOS.md

EVE does have a pretty decent support for various gateways: https://wiki.lfedge.org/display/EVE/Hardware+Platforms+Suppo... but as you can see there’s a heavy tilt towards Intel-based systems (simply because they are the ones with way more existing workloads available for them).

Now, let's talk about business side of things: Balena and ZEDEDA are very different when it comes to the value add on top of the open source platform. Balena aims at being more of a PaaS solution (sort of like Heroku of that space) where ZEDEDA is clearly an IaaS/CaaS (or better yet ECasS) solution. That said, both companies have their Cloud Based portions. Balena has https://www.balena.io/cloud/ and ZEDEDA has https://zedcontrol.zededa.net/

In EVE’s terminology that zedcontrol service in the cloud is called a Controller https://github.com/lf-edge/eve/tree/master/docs#eve-controll...

At ZEDEDA we believe that we’re providing the most scalable controller to our customers, however, there’s an open source controller implementation as well: https://github.com/lf-edge/adam

Adam is somewhat new and we’re still working on making it a bit more polished so all of your pull requests will be very much welcome!

Finally, there are other architectural differences that are mentioned in the doc I linked about. Things like Balena is build on top of Yocto, while EVE leverages amazing linuxkit project (the same one that powers Docker Desktop product). I'm only mentioning this because ironically enough, while Balena was a pioneer of Docker containers in IoT space, the way the system itself is put together is still very much embedded-like.