Chapter 4: Diving Deep into the IoT Backend (the IoT Cloud)

In previous chapters, we mentioned the terms Internet of Things (IoT) cloud and IoT backend quite a lot. In those chapters, we were focusing mainly on IoT endpoint devices, IoT Edge devices, and the connectivity between those devices and the internet.

The goal of the previous chapters was to show the ability to sense the physical world and act upon the useful business operation data collected from the physical world through IoT devices, then through the different IoT connectivity options; such generated and collected IoT data is sent to the IoT backend operation and control systems, or IoT cloud in short, for further processing and analysis. 

The sensing part is directed from the IoT devices toward the IoT backend systems, which follows the IoT telemetry design pattern. The opposite direction is from the IoT backend systems toward the IoT devices to act upon and control those IoT devices, which follows...

The IoT cloud

Before we go into the details of the IoT cloud, let's first understand the difference between a data center and the cloud.

Data center and the cloud

Traditionally, organizations hosted their IT workloads and systems either in data centers that were on-premises (in-house) or off-premises (off-house) and supported by internal infrastructure teams or third parties or in external data centers supported and maintained by external third parties altogether.

Running and maintaining a data center is not an easy task; if you run a data center on your own, then you will need to deal with things such as finding suitable buildings or data center facilities to host your servers and network infrastructure, power supply and consumption, physical security, and governmental regulations.

From a business point of view, running and maintaining a data center is a business domain in itself. So, the question will be, as a company working in the agriculture, transportation,...

Kubernetes (the container orchestrator)

As stated earlier, from our point of view, Kubernetes is the best compute engine option to run your IoT backend cloud workloads, for many reasons. To mention a few, it is open source (created initially by Google, and then Google open sourced it), it has huge community support, it has massive ecosystems, solutions, and tools built around it, it is widely adopted, tested, and used by so many large organizations across the globe, and it is supported and offered as a managed service by almost all public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, and so on).

But what attracts us the most to Kubernetes is its portable nature, which is driven by it being open source . For example, you can have a Kubernetes cluster running on a private cloud on VMs or bare metal, on a public cloud IaaS, or on a public cloud CaaS, you can have many Kubernetes clusters running in different clouds (private or public), and you can control all of those clusters here...

AWS cloud overview

AWS is the largest and the market-leading public cloud provider. The AWS cloud provides all the different cloud service offerings, such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and CaaS. AWS offers more than 200 services covering computing, networking, storage, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), game development, security, DevOps, IoT, databases (SQL, NoSQL, graph, and so on), big data, data analytics, Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), application development, satellite services, robotics, and so many other services.

In the following points, let's cover some facts about the AWS cloud:

• AWS global cloud infrastructure is built around the concepts of AWS Regions and Availability Zones.
• An AWS Region is a physical location in the world where AWS has what is called Availability Zones. AWS maintains multiple geographic regions, for example, Regions in North America, South America, Europe, China, Asia Pacific, South Africa, and the Middle...

Summary

In this chapter, you have learned about the IoT cloud or IoT backend, in particular the IoT cloud infrastructure.

Now, you will be able to identify and evaluate the different infrastructure options for your IoT cloud, whether it is private, public, or hybrid cloud, whether you will use a VM or container, whether you will use Kubernetes or not, and which option of Kubernetes to choose: managed Kubernetes services or the DIY Kubernetes option.

You also learned about the AWS cloud, its structure, and the different services and solutions it provides that can help you to design and deliver a production-grade and large-scale end-to-end IoT solution on AWS.

In the next chapter, we will cover the second part of the IoT cloud or IoT backend. We will cover the different IoT applications and solutions provided by the AWS IoT platform.