This book is geared to software practitioners who intend, or may have already started, to build and deploy production-ready Edge solutions. It is a good idea to have that solution in mind when reading this book. And, as software developers, we assume you understand the basics of writing and building software – that is, the use of common general-purpose languages, the use of the Make tool, and how to submit your software to a build pipeline.

We highly recommend reading, Edge Computing Patterns for Solution Architects by Joseph Pearson and Ashok Iyengar (ISBN 978-1805124061, Packt Publishing, Jan-2024) to gain more insight into the architecture patterns for a successful Edge computing solution.

Given their importance to production Edge solutions, we will be leveraging Docker and Linux in this book. There is little substitute for knowing Linux, but if you do not know Docker, it may be sufficient to know Podman or Kubernetes.

You will be installing the Linux Foundation LF Edge Open Horizon project from https://github.com/open-horizon. Confirm that you have access to this site.

Ideally, you will install the Open Horizon Management Hub on one machine (representing your central point of control in your enterprise or cloud data center), and the Open Horizon agent on another machine (representing your Edge device).

For the Management Hub, you will need an x86 machine with at least 4 GB of RAM and 20 GB of storage space.

For the agent (Edge device), you will need an x86, ARM, PowerPC (ppc64le), or Mac (Intel or Silicon) with a minimum of 200 MB of RAM and 400 MB of storage space – plus whatever additional space your Edge application will require on that device.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.