Palau Release

Delivery:  ~ November 2025

Namer:  Rodney Hess (Beechwoods Software)

Per the Palau Planning Meeting (04/2025), Palau will be a 4.1 release following on from Odesa 4.0. Palau will not be an LTS release. The previous version (4.0) will remain under LTS until March 2027

Release Theme: Stability and maturity 

Key delivery items to include:

• Performance enhancements:
  • Reducing payload for device events. Many users asked for a smaller, more optimal, device reading event payload. 
  • CBOR encoding for all readings. Orthogonal to reducing the payload but expected to obtain good performance gains here compared to simply JSON encoding.
• Device SDK alignment and new features:
  • Go and C Device SDK functional parity identified as high priority with four relatively simple known issues to resolve.
  • In addition, strengthening of the C Device SDK by adding automated testing, service client support and CLI options that are present in the Go version.
  • Ahead of any new language Device SDKs that have been suggested (e.g. Rust) agreed that a device SDK specification (i.e. stronger docs) is required.
  • Plan to support delivering a generic payload to the device discovery POST command. This will help device service implementations to perform bespoke discovery tasks.
  • Plan to support users adding their own friendly or alias names to a device that has already been onboarded and discovered.
• Security improvements:
  • API Input Validation and Checking – create an ADR and aim to implement throughout the EdgeX services in 4.1.
  • Audit Logging – create ADR as the first step and aim to implement for 4.1.
  • Backup and Recovery –  create detailed Use Case Records (UCR) for first review and analysis.
  • Denial of Service (DoS) Resilience –  create detailed Use Case Records (UCR) for first review and analysis. Stretch goal for in 4.1.
  • Threat Model – Work is required to update the existing STRIDE model from EdgeX 2.2. But more feedback on need and urgency is required. Plan to form a small working group to proceed here, and somewhat related to DoS above.
• Usability enhancements
  • Scheduler Service On/Off Support – plan to add support for iCalendar style time-based actions to the scheduler service for 4.1. Will be additive to current implementation.
  • Delete Multiple Device API – plan to add extra APIs to allow device services to have all devices deleted. Also aim to provide a new Device Service flag to override the existing entities (devices/device profiles/provision watchers) that are stored in Core Metadata with local device files).
  • Device Instance level Device Commands – plan to allow overriding the device resources that should be part of a Device Command for a specific device, e.g. for cases where different auto event timings are required for specific devices.