Enterprise Internet of Things Stack, Edge Gateway and Platforms
Here is an end to end view of how to build connected products using an Enterprise IoT stack. The Enterprise IoT stack provides a core set of capabilities, platform, services and architecture patterns to build end to end connected products.
The following table summaries the offerings from commercial players and open source alternatives.
Comparison of IoT Platform Stack
(The reference is part of my book — Enterprise IoT)
The article provides a vendor neutral view of what offerings are provided by major IoT platforms and open source alternatives. In my view, the real value of Internet of Things is deriving actionable insights and in future you might be able to use a combination of services across the vendors to derive an outcome.
In order to derive actionable insights, you need to analyze the data (from sensors and multiple other sources). Data in IoT context can be broadly classified into 4 types — structured data (a sequence of data or time series information from sensors), unstructured data like images from cameras or drones, a combination of structured and unstructured data, like in case of augmented reality where you superimpose images and text to derive an outcome and fourth being behavioural data where devices learn from interactions, the cognitive aspects of the devices. Each of these use cases requires separate architecture and algorithms and based on the use cases, the computation need to happen on the Edge, cloud or an hybrid approach. For instance, if your use case is around security and surveillance, you would employ computer vision technologies at the edge for processing and analyzing the images locally as it doesn’t make sense to stream the data over the cloud (in such cases, around 99% of the data would not be required). For employing computer vision technologies at the Edge, you can use technologies like deep learning at the edge. For details, refer to my earlier article (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/applying-deep-learning-computer-vision-edge-gateway-naveen-balani).
Secondly, Edge computing would play a critical role in any IoT implementation. I see lot of innovations happening in Edge gateway where we move from the current rules/analytics approach to a solution/domain specific intelligent gateway.
For more details on the how to realize the architecture with various use cases, kindly refer to my book — “Enterprise IoT”.