Sift, a data infrastructure company for mission-critical hardware, has launched Sift Edge, an edge-computing version of its platform built to capture telemetry directly at the test stand instead of routing it through the cloud first. The company built Edge for aerospace, defense, robotics, and energy programs that run high-stakes tests in places where the network can't be trusted.
Edge writes streaming telemetry to local disk the instant it arrives, then syncs to Sift's cloud platform once a connection returns. A native desktop app lets engineers view and query that data live, and anyone on the test network can connect to the same instance to watch the channels they care about. Teams choose what syncs to the cloud and when, useful for test stands that generate far more data than a company wants to pay to move. Engineers running thermal-vacuum tests, remote proving-ground trials, or work inside secure defense facilities will care about not having to maintain a second, improvised data stack just to survive a dropped connection.
Sift built Edge as a Rust application for macOS, Windows, and Linux, light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi and on a single machine with no cluster or extra services required. Because Edge uses the same APIs as Sift's cloud platform, integrations engineers already built keep working unchanged. "Sift Edge puts full-fidelity capture, live viewing, and query right at the hardware, and it moves us a layer closer to the machine, talking directly to DAQs and the instruments generating the data," said Austin Spiegel, co-founder and CEO of Sift.
The company says the design replaces a common workaround: a second, homegrown stack of open-source databases, dashboards, and custom scripts kept alive only to handle outages. Will Pressly, lead engineer at CX2, said he built a Prometheus-to-Sift bridge on Edge in 12 minutes, after which live thermal telemetry from drone components started flowing in from the company's development hardware-in-the-loop system.
Sift Edge is available by request for teams in aerospace, defense, robotics, and energy building complex machines.
