Cloud Data Center

Have a look at how a leading Cloud Company, as Oracle, is building its next generation Cloud DataCenters.

High performance, non over-subscribed networks, security at all tiers, are key ingredients.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4RBs43G17g

New Oracle Team USA Boat, IoT

In this really interesting article from Forbes, it is explained how IoT and Advanced Analytics technologies, together with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, are used to help analyze and optimize the behaviour of the Oracle Team USA boat. An impressive and nice example of IoT technologies applied to Sport.

 "It’s estimated that every time the yacht and its crew set sail, they generate as much as a terabyte of data, much of it video, collected from as many as 1,000 sensors attached to myriad boat and body parts and fed into a powerful Oracle Exadata database for analysis.
For example, about 400 aerodynamic pressure sensors have been added to the boat’s wing sail. Those Airbus-developed sensors, called MEMs (micro-electro-mechanical systems), provide ORACLE TEAM USA with important information on the flow around the rigid sail under various conditions, helping the crew further optimize performance and maneuvers."

New ORACLE TEAM USA Boat An Engineering Marvel, Data Machine

Cloud and 12-factor App

If you want to build Applications that are easily deployed to a Cloud Platform, that can be easily distributed, for example over Containers, and can scale well, you need to adopt a different approach from, for example, the one used to develop Enterprise Applications based on JEE.

A set of recommendations and best practices are summarized in the so-called “12 Factor App”.
One page worth the reading:

https://12factor.net/

Each of the Twelve Factors is explained in a separate page (follow the link).

Containerize your IoT

Now, imagine that we want to scale our HomeAutomation solution.

For example, we need to design a SmartBuilding solution, a solution for a large building, like a Hotel or a large building containing hundreds of offices.

We want a solution that enable us to:

1. Monitor the temperature in each room, to implement a smart control of heating and cooling and enable us to reduce the energy consumption;
2. Monitor the air quality in each room;
3. Manage a set of sensors in each room (fire, …);
4. Manage the lights in each room remotely (for example, if no-one is inside, turn-off the lights);
5.  …..

 This is what I would call a medium scale IoT solution.

 We can decide to adopt a four layers architecture: 

1. Devices;
2. Floor Gateway
3. IoT HuB
4. Enterprise Application

Now, the question I want to work on is: how do you design and build what I have called the IoT HUB?

First, the most important decision: do you want to adopt a Cloud Platform or build on-premises? (Well, there is a third option: an hybrid solution, but for now let’s limit to the first two).

In a future blog post I’ll examine how to build it using a Cloud Provider. But now I want to discuss how to build it in your Data Center.

First of all, let’s recap what kind of capabilities you need: 

1. A Messaging backbone (Message Broker), to receive all messages coming from devices and to implement the publish-subscribe pattern;
2. A Device State (or Shadow) component, to store the latest state and messages from devices;
3. A Message Store, to store persistently all the message received from devices (with some retention period set);
4. A Device Registry;
5. A Monitoring Dashboard
6. ….

In my Home Automation previous blog posts, these are all Building Blocks hosted in my Raspberry PI, since it is enough for a House.

 But for our Smart Building solution we need:

1. To scale-up the solution, to have enough computing power;
2. Clusterize, to give High Availability, in case one component fails;

The design idea I’m going to explore here and in (hope to have enough time) next blog’s posts is to “Containerize your IoT”.

In other words: the adoption a Containerization technology (here: Docker) so that each one of the Building Blocks (see list of capabilities above) I have mentioned here maps to a Container, following the “Micro-Services” Architecture Paradigm.