This chapter focuses on Mainflux. We will provide an overview of the architecture and discuss steps for setting up the ecosystem, event management and system dashboards, the application integration layer, and security. We will also build an end-to-end example.
Introduction to Mainflux
Mainflux is a modern, highly secured open source and patent-free IoT cloud platform written in Go, based on a set of microservices. It allows device, user, and application connections over various network protocols, like HTTP, MQTT, WebSocket, and CoAP, making a seamless bridge between them.
It is used as the IoT middleware for building complex IoT solutions. As is often the case with these platform systems, Mainflux exposes southbound API to connect devices and northbound API to connect applications, then it allows message routing between them. The whole bottom-to-top system (device, Mainflux platform, and application) together forms what is called a “vertical solution,” very specific to the given use case.
Figure 4-1 depicts a typical IoT system, and shows where Mainflux sits in the overall architecture.
Figure 4-1. Location of Mainflux inside the IoT system
We can see that Mainflux is the middle block that does a lot of the heavy lifting. The IoT product designer can reuse this block and focus only on the leftmost part (connected devices—that is, the physical design, firmware, ...
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