Architecting IoT Solutions on Azure

Chapter 12. Data Consumers

You finally made it to the far right side of the IoT Landscape. You are currently looking at the IoT Landscape while considering it from the perspective of people or systems that consume data generated by IoT devices. Data consumers, highlighted in Figure 12-1, do not have visibility into all the intricate processes involved in enabling data to move from IoT devices to their end use. Instead, they are limited to observing the servicing layer. In basic terms, data consumers may not understand all the complexities behind data collection, transmission, and processing; they only interact with the final, service-oriented aspects of the system. As you learned in the previous chapter, data architectures contain a servicing layer, which bridges the raw data and the end users, the data consumers. These data consumers play a crucial role in extracting meaningful insights and driving actionable outcomes from the vast amounts of data available, which is what you’ll learn in this chapter.

Figure 12-1. The consumer domain of the IoT Landscape

In the last chapter, you read about different approaches to exposing data through push- and pull-style delivery mechanisms. On the consumer side, the types of consumers could be either, so rather than look at them through the delivery style, it’s helpful to see them according to their consumption patterns. Consumers use five ...