Nine architectural principles to consider before building an IoT platform

2024-03-04

The Internet of Things is no longer just a cutting-edge technology, it has shown potential in changing society and technology. It still has significant economic impact: by 2025, the IoT market will exceed $1.5 trillion.

A survey by Cisco shows that although devices are being connected on a large scale, 75% of IoT projects have failed. This failure is due to too many devices, data, and cloud fragments. However, every company with IoT ideas wants to control data and their customers, and have their own platform. Therefore, we see multiple IoT platforms entering the market, and their solutions lack the true architectural principles for building platforms.

Here are nine design principles to consider before building your own IoT platform:

1. Scalability

By 2025, the Internet of Things will generate 79.4ZB of data, most of which is unstructured. Due to the wide variety of devices, even platforms require distribution.

For such massive data, a microservices based architecture should be used to organize, scale, and reuse it. This makes it possible to easily distribute applications, where each service is independent of each other and can be created, upgraded, and expanded without interfering with other services.

2. Security

By the end of 2020, the number of IoT devices will reach 30 billion, but you should also look at insecure deployments, lack of security updates, and lack of visibility, which attract hackers every 39 seconds.

Each IoT device should have a secure gateway terminal and data should have dynamic and static encryption capabilities. Appropriate network firewall design and communication security should be ensured between the transport layer and the communication layer. Regular data and network security audits are necessary to identify anomalies and threats.

3. High availability

There are many critical IoT systems, such as in the healthcare sector, whose downtime may lead to loss of life. To reduce downtime, they need to have a fault-tolerant architecture and run in a high availability (HA) environment. Data should be backed up and distributed in multiple locations to prevent data loss in the event of a catastrophic event. The backup solution should maintain data integrity and be easy to recover.

In addition, a fail over strategy should be developed to redirect end user requests to a standby state, and it should be as seamless as possible.

4. Quick deployment

Any IoT solution should be able to quickly deploy new features and updates. The centralized deployment pattern (such as Kubernetes, DockerSarm, or AWSElaticContainerServices) enables DevOps teams to quickly and automatically test and deploy new services. This enables critical IoT solutions to easily maintain a new state with zero impact on end-users.

5. Data access within the application

The data accessed by IoT devices should be stored in closer locations to reduce network latency and costs, and improve security. IoT devices should be connected through secure terminals to send and receive data, and each step should verify and authorize the device's identity. In order to reduce contention and optimize computing power, IoT platforms that access data should handle asynchronous data as much as possible.

6. Data management

IoT devices generate massive amounts of data, but not all data needs to be processed. A deep understanding of data helps filter out unnecessary data, so you can only collect and process relevant data - without the need for big data, it can capture the intelligent data you need.

The generated data must be viewed in a comprehensive manner to ensure compliance and regulatory compliance. Ensure understanding of relevant laws and regulations to understand which safety measures are mandatory.

7. Equipment management

Imagine that you have successfully deployed over 20000 sensor nodes and gateways in three to four regions. After a period of time, you will receive a notification stating that there is a vulnerability in the gateway firmware, and you realize that updates cannot be made unless the end user manually downloads the patch and updates the device themselves. Prepare and plan some good equipment management.

8. Platform monitoring

Every IoT application should be able to take preventive measures against events that may cause any type of interruption. They should not only use automatic signals to alarm, but also quickly diagnose errors and be able to repair them when faults occur.

9. Scalability

The Internet of Things is at an exciting moment of development, and this technology will continue to grow. The components used are shrinking to the smallest possible size and the quantity is also increasing, creating new opportunities for technology.

No matter what the design of the Internet of Things architecture is, it must be scalable. This feature not only helps to support size, but also facilitates dynamic integration with other technologies.

Some ideas for the future

There are too many IoT platforms because too many people want to build their own platforms. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. Before building your own IoT platform, you should consider using the existing platform.

The existing IoT platforms are built on the basis of standard cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure. The data we receive increases exponentially with the number of connected devices. Obviously, the cost of data has also increased exponentially. If you use all the data being sent, regardless of whether it is useful or not, the cost of sending data to the cloud will skyrocket. One way to reduce these costs is to only obtain the data you need.

Afterwards, be very careful when collecting what data and where it is collected - otherwise, there may be many legal and compliance issues in terms of privacy. For example, in the event of data leakage or violation, GDPR fines may be very high.

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