Programming the Internet of Things

Part IV. Connecting to the Cloud

Introduction

Blue skies, no limits.

How oddly trite a statement.

There is sky...with clouds.

So far, you’ve learned how to pull your Edge Tier together, and you’ve added some useful capabilities to your GDA and CDA applications. Your system can collect data from simulated and emulated sensors, process it within the Edge Tier, and trigger actuation events based on preconfigured floor and ceiling limits.

Of course, this doesn’t make your system part of the IoT, since you haven’t yet connected it to the internet—at least not yet!

What You’ll Learn in This Section

Chapter 11 digs into the internet connectivity aspect of the IoT by walking through some exercises to connect your GDA into one or more IoT-enabled cloud services using the MQTT protocol. There are certainly other ways to do this—many cloud services provide numerous mechanisms for connecting gateway devices into their platform. To keep things simple and largely platform agnostic, though, I’ll focus the exercises on MQTT connectivity only.

Finally, in Chapter 12, I’ll discuss a few IoT-specific use cases that you can implement on your own. These will help you apply the concepts and principles from earlier chapters to new IoT problem areas and build solutions.

While cloud computing is a complex topic, I think you’ll soon see how straightforward the process of connecting to the cloud can be. And once your code is functioning in the cloud, the sky is the limit for what you can do next.