Flexibility and interoperability in the field of IoT software is a paramount objective. The mix of platforms, “things”, applications, intelligence, etc. which are connected in an IoT deployment is extensive and ever growing. How do you create a software platform that connects to a variety of old & new, greenfield and brownfield devices and sensors, allows the incorporation of various edge analytics, communicates to a diverse set of cloud and enterprise platforms like Azure IoT Hub, Google IoT Core, AWS IoT, etc.? The solution, as exhibited in EdgeX Foundry (an open source, vendor neutral IoT platform hosted by the Linux Foundation), is to use a microservice architecture. In this session, come learn about EdgeX Foundry, how it works, and see how its microservices architecture can help:
- Address the challenges of dealing with the IoT protocol soup (Modbus, BACnet, BLE, Zigbee, ZWave, MQTT, OPC-UA, etc.)
- Solve the issues of “your data model/format is not my model/format” when connecting the edge to applications in your enterprise
- Facilitate organizations in incorporating use case specific edge analytics or event processing
- Allow for the continual improvements and upgrades of various parts of the IoT solution without requiring a redo of the entire platform
- Allow for value additions into your IoT solution in order to allow return on investment
- Maximize the utilization of available resources, which tend to be more constrained at the edge
- Incorporate best of breed solutions for any part of the IoT solution that already exist or may exist in the future.
No software architecture is a silver bullet. The presentation will also explore additional challenges (and lessons learned) that a microservices IoT architecture introduce and that must be addressed to include dealing with orchestration/deployment, security and additional communication latency.
