Architecting IoT Solutions on Azure

Chapter 7. Scalable Data Architecture

Let’s talk about data. No, I’m not talking about the android on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’m talking about the massive deluge of bits and bytes that IoT devices create, and somehow you have to figure out what to do with all of it. Pretty much the entire right side of the IoT Landscape (Figure 7-1) deals with data, and the next few chapters of this book are going to look at this, but one of the basic questions to answer for all data needs is: “Where am I going to store all this stuff?”

Figure 7-1. Data architectures in the IoT Landscape

Not too long ago, this might have been a simple question to answer: stuff the data into a database and be done with it. This solution would have been suitable for most workloads then, but as data grew exponentially larger, the database platforms at the time did not increase proportionally. The notion of “big data” was born, and a whole new class of data tools, processes, and analytic procedures were developed to handle the deluge of data while keeping costs down. One of those solutions involved using new patterns for storing data.

The plethora of new storage patterns had profound implications for data storage, and because every solution has unique needs, there is no one-size-fits-all for solutions. Every IoT solution I have ever looked at had nuances, and these nuances can radically shape how storage ...