Chapter 5: Exploring IoT Platforms

With IoT platforms, we come to the most interesting part in designing and building a large-scale IoT solution.

In the previous chapter, we discussed the IoT Cloud (or the IoT backend) infrastructure part. In this chapter, we will go through the software part of the IoT Cloud. In other words, we will explore the different software services and components that should be provided by the IoT Cloud as a backbone for large-scale IoT solutions.

As explained before, in IoT solutions, software or app development spans all of the IoT solution layers. Software is present everywhere in IoT solution layers. In Chapter 2, The "I" in IoT – IoT Connectivity, we discussed the different software that could be running on IoT and Edge devices to collect, process, and act upon the collected IoT data through the different IoT sensors attached to IoT devices.

In the IoT backend, we need to understand the different software services deployed in...

IoT platform overview

The IoT platform definition according to Gartner is an on-premises software suite or a cloud service (IoT platform as a service (PaaS)) that monitors and may manage and control various types of endpoints, often via application business units deployed on the platform. An IoT platform usually provides (or provisions) web-scale infrastructure capabilities to support basic and advanced IoT solutions and digital business operations.

Practically, we define the IoT platform as a platform that provides and supports the following capabilities for IoT solutions:

• IoT core, which covers the IoT Cloud gateway that supports different protocols for receiving and sending IoT data or messages from and to IoT devices – protocols such as MQTT, HTTPS, and MQTT over WebSocket.  
• IoT device management, which covers how to control IoT devices remotely, firmware updates, and many other device management features. 
• IoT analytics, which covers...

IoT platform (buy, build, or use?)

Before answering the question of whether to buy, build, or use a managed cloud IoT platform, let's agree upon the following facts:

• There is no single vendor or IoT platform that can cover or provide everything needed for building an E2E and robust IoT solution. This fact applies to hyperscale vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and others, too.

The different IoT platform vendors might provide a huge set of components and solution building blocks that assist in building large-scale and production-grade IoT solutions, but you may discover some components that they do not provide or support, for example, IoT connectivity management, in particular, cellular IoT connectivity. For this IoT connectivity management component, you might have to depend on mobile network operators' IoT connectivity platforms for managing the cellular connectivity used in the IoT solution. Another example is IoT device hardware. Most vendors will...

The AWS IoT platform

The AWS Cloud provides lots of different services and solutions across many domains. Let's go through the IoT services provided by AWS:

Figure 5.1 – AWS services in the AWS console – Internet of Things and others

In Figure 5.1, we have deliberately used a screenshot of all AWS services, and not just those IoT services that are available in the AWS console at the time of writing this book, to stress the fact we mentioned earlier that when you select an IoT platform from one of the hyperscale cloud providers, you also get a huge set of other interesting services that you will need when building a complete E2E IoT solution.

For example, in Figure 5.1, you will see about 22 machine learning services and 15 analytic services; under database services, you will see all the different database options that you might need, and the same can be said under storage services, application integration, and so on.

At the time of...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about IoT platforms and their capabilities, the solution building blocks that IoT platforms provide, and how to select the best IoT platform for your IoT solutions.

You also learned about MQTT, the most common and well-known IoT application communication protocol.

To get a practical sense of IoT platforms, we took a deep dive into one of those IoT platforms – the AWS IoT platform. In this chapter, you learned about some of the services offered by the AWS IoT platform, including AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT 1-Click, and AWS IoT Things Graph.

In the next chapter, we will continue our IoT journey by covering the IoT device management domain, and we will also cover some of the AWS IoT platform services in that domain, such as AWS IoT Device Management and IoT Device Defender.