The cloud is the central station of any IoT solution, and a critical component. While it may be tempting to think about the IoT device cloud as the equivalent of a web or mobile application, the Internet of Things introduces its own unique characteristics and subsystems. In this chapter, we’ll examine some of those characteristics, including cloud-device connectivity and security, device ingress and egress, and data normalization and protocol translation.
In IoT technical diagrams such as Figure 4-1, it’s common to structure visualizations of the architecture from the bottom up, reflecting the mental model of edge devices being “on the ground” relative to the cloud. Using this diagram, let’s follow the journey of a message as it flows from the edge to the cloud.
Figure 4-1. The device cloud is the central station of an IoT solution, processing and analyzing data received from the edge
Cloud-to-Device Connectivity
Making sure we get the right message from the edge device to the cloud is paramount. When it comes to cloud-to-device connectivity, security is increasingly a major area of concern, and rightly so. Even a modest-sized IoT installation can provide numerous potential intrusion points via edge devices that, unlike modern PCs or smartphones, have limited computing resources. This combination of traffic quantity, device constraints, and the wide variety ...
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