Foundational Elements of an IoT Solution

Chapter 1. Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) has a rich technological legacy and a bright future: ubiquitous connectivity has created a new paradigm, and the closed, static, and bounded systems of the past will soon be obsolete. With the connection of low-cost sensors to cloud platforms, it’s now possible to track, analyze, and respond to operational data at scale. The promise of the IoT is indeed wonderful: intelligent systems made up of smart machines that talk with each other and with people in real time, and data analytics driving optimization and transformation in industries as varied and far-reaching as aeronautics and agriculture, transportation and municipal services, manufacturing and healthcare, and even within our homes.

Building the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things presents exciting opportunities to transform business, but the specific approaches and patterns remain somewhat ill-defined. So, maybe it’s not entirely surprising that the recent tidal wave of marketing hype has engendered some well-deserved skepticism about the IoT’s true business and social value. Questions about security and fears that such wide-ranging connectedness will make privacy all but extinct are commonplace. These are legitimate issues that are being addressed, and will require continuing maturity of both the business and technology factors if the IoT is to achieve long-term, broad-based success.

Regardless, it’s clear that, in order to take on the challenges of design for this new connected world, engineers, designers, technologists, and business people need to fundamentally shift their thinking. IoT design will be quite different from design for other complex systems; data will be the critical material, shared across open and flexible networks. Making the most of IoT for your business requires strategic thinking and careful planning.

If you don’t quite know where to start with the IoT, you’ve come to the right place. This guide is for those who have heard both the grand promise and the skeptical inquiries and nevertheless want to get their boots on the ground. The guide introduces you to the high-level concepts, components, and patterns for any type of IoT solution. It will help you to understand the technology and architecture, so that you, the technologist, can dispel misconceptions within your organization and assess the opportunities for the IoT to advance your business. The potential of the IoT may well be limitless—but in order to get to that promise, we need to get started.

What This Guide Is Not

You’ll find a bevy of other IoT primers on the websites of technology vendors, standards groups, and industry consortiums, many of them extremely insightful, but all slightly biased towards either a technology or philosophical premise about how the IoT should work. There isn’t anything wrong with these sources, and you are encouraged to check out what they have to say, but the goal of this guide is to provide you with the real-world tools and patterns that are in use, or on the near-term horizon, based on practical hands-on experience in hundreds of IoT solutions over the last decade. This guide is about what works for the IoT today and what the considerations are for implementing something right now.

A Technologist’s Definition of the IoT

In 1999, Kevin Ashton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) coined the term Internet of Things. At the time, industrial automation technologies were starting to move from the factory into new environments like hospitals, banks, and offices. This early form of intercommunication often involved machines of the same type—such as a one ATM machine talking to another in the same general location—hence the term, Machine-to-Machine, or M2M. As early M2M implementations grew increasingly more sophisticated, machines were connected to other kinds of devices like servers. Those servers ultimately moved from on-premise locations into data centers and eventually “the cloud.”

We can appreciate the prescience of Kevin Ashton’s term. Yet while the “IoT” is a catchy phrase, it doesn’t help us understand the full implications of this new paradigm. While the Internet is, of course a critical, enabling element, it is only a part of the essential concept—the idea that we can connect our reality, part and parcel, to the virtual world of information systems—that is so truly transformational for smart connected products and operations alike.

Today, the Internet of Things can include industrial and commercial products, everyday products like dishwashers and thermostats, and local networks of sensors to monitor farms and cities. In an IoT solution, objects can be sensed and controlled through the Internet, whether these objects are remote devices, smart products, or sensors that represent the status of a physical location. And information can be made available to applications, data warehouses, and business systems.

Guide Outline

For some developers, the IoT may seem like a mishmash of technologies arranged in a bewildering set of combinations. It’s true that this is an area where embedded computing, MEMs, broadband and mobile networking, distributed cloud computing, advanced distributed database architectures, cutting-edge web and mobile user interfaces, and deep enterprise integrations all converge. But thankfully there are some clean layers that we can use to inform our mental model of IoT solutions.

Our guide is divided into four chapters:

Chapter 2, Solution Patterns for the Internet of Things

As we tackle other topics in the Internet of Things, it is helpful to think about recurring architectural patterns—in smart, connected products versus smart, connected operations, new and innovative experiences, and so on. The first section of the guide gives you a mental framework to think about your solution.

Chapter 3, The Edge of the IoT

The edge of the IoT is where all the “Things” reside: from sensors to vehicles, everyday products to entirely new kinds of gadgets. Our focus in this section is on how we will connect, secure, and interact with things from the cloud.

Chapter 4, The Cloud

The cloud, of course, is a critical component of any IoT solution. This section of the guide outlines the key cloud technologies, design goals, and implementation details associated with IoT.

Chapter 5, IoT Applications

All our hard work in connecting the edge to the cloud would be for naught if we didn’t surface information about these “Things” through software applications. This part of the guide covers ways to get your applications to market or into the hands of your business quickly and effectively.

For technologists, the IoT has the potential to be most rewarding; it’s where hardware, software, and networks bring new solutions to life, bridging the physical and digital worlds.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the contributions of Linda Frembes, and the O’Reilly editorial team, especially Susan Conant and Jeff Bleiel. Thank you for all your work.