Reliability, Fault Tolerance, and Monitoring IIoT Applications

In the previous chapter, we covered how IIoT applications can be deployed, secured, and scaled for large-scale industrial use cases. This chapter focuses on bulletproofing IIoT applications with a focus on building stable, reliable, and fault-tolerant IIoT applications that can be monitored on a 24/7 basis.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following key topics:

• How to build production-ready IIoT applications that are stable and reliable
• How to build performant IIoT applications on the edge and the cloud
• How to build fault-tolerant IIoT applications on the edge and the cloud
• How to monitor an IIoT application on the edge and the cloud

Complexity of an IIoT system

An IIoT system is a significantly complex ecosystem of diverse components that is in a state of continuous change, never static, and always evolving with various parts of the ecosystem prone to different types of stress and failures. A node on the edge will be added or removed every day, cloud connectivity will be lost, or new builds on the cloud will be deployed multiple times per day. In addition, old APIs could be swapped for newer and better ones at an astounding pace. Making the system reliable and fault-tolerant is paramount to the successful usage of the application. Before we dive into discussing the various aspects of this chapter, let's look at a typical architecture of the IIoT system for reference. A typical IIoT system consists of cloud services such as APIs, runtimes, a data store, messaging services, and edge gateways deployed on...

Art of building reliable and resilient IIoT applications

We use the term reliability for a system that should continue to work correctly (performing the correct function at the desired level of performance) even in the face of adversity (hardware or software faults and even human error). A reliable system has some of the following characteristics:

• The application performs the function that the user expected
• The ability to self-configure to withstand changing environmental conditions

• Its performance is good enough for the required use case, under the expected load and data volume
• The system should be usable and maintainable in the long term
• Has application robustness in the face of uncertain information
• Has resistance to security problems such as preventing unauthorized access

In the following sections, we will discuss how to build and test for reliability on the cloud,...

The art of building a fault-tolerant IIoT device and edge gateway

We will switch gears from the cloud tier and focus on Tier 1 and Tier 2, that is, the device and the gateway and how we can build reliability into these key components of the IIoT architecture.

Designing for reliability at the sensors and devices

The main pain point for the device is the ability to communicate reliably to the gateway or to the cloud and send the sensor data in a secure way. The reliability of communications can be attributed to the performance of a few critical components: a radio transceiver and communications microcontroller as part of the device. Wireless connectivity technologies utilized by consumer devices do not always satisfy the greater...

Monitoring IIoT applications (edge and cloud)

In this section, we will discuss monitoring various different components of IoT tiers such as the cloud tier, the gateway tier, and sensor tiers. We will go over the cloud microservices monitoring strategy subsequently over the general IoT monitoring approaches.

Monitoring IoT services on the cloud

Proper monitoring of IoT applications is very important and there are many benefits to implementing a very robust monitoring strategy such as the following:

• Monitoring provides a higher level of application and network security across the many different components of the IoT system
• Consistent monitoring and diagnosis/resolution of issues improves the ability to reach and maintain peak...

Summary

In this chapter, we went though a detailed overview of how to build reliable IIoT applications at all of the three IoT application tiers using various design patterns. In addition, we looked at how to monitor the IoT system to successfully maintain the deployed system over the years to come.