Architecting the Industrial Internet: The architect's guide to designing Industrial Internet solutions by Shyam Nath & Robert Stackowiak & Carla Romano

Author:Shyam Nath & Robert Stackowiak & Carla Romano [Nath, Shyam]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: COM066000 - COMPUTERS / Enterprise Applications / Collaboration Software, COM048000 - COMPUTERS / Systems Architecture / Distributed Systems and Computing, COM091000 - COMPUTERS / Cloud Computing
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Published: 2017-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

The speed layer and field gateways

Earlier in this chapter, we pictured a speed layer in our architecture consisting of an IoT hub and/or event hub(s) serving as a cloud gateway and a streaming analytics engine. A cloud gateway is paired with a field gateway at the edge, or the cloud gateway will sometimes communicate directly with the smart devices themselves.

Some organizations deploy the speed layer on-premises instead of in the cloud to be located close to their existing batch layer systems. If transmission of data occurs to a central on-premises location, the gateway architecture would be similar, except an on-premises gateway would be pictured in our earlier diagram instead of the cloud gateway. This is especially common in organizations that built Industrial Internet solutions prior to public clouds gaining in popularity and the functionality required for these types of solutions.

Field gateways gather event data at the edge from smart devices and sensors. They are usually sized based on the number of data streams that will occur, the data collection rate (events/second), and the data storage duration desired. These gateways might be custom developed or provided by vendors. OSIsoft and ThingWorx are two such popular vendors deployed as part of many custom-built solutions.

Field gateways ingest messages, filter data, provide identity mapping, and log messages (for auditing purposes) as well as provide linkage to cloud or on-premises gateways. A newer trend has emerged to also perform stream analytics and machine learning within the field gateways. The ability to push these applications to the edge is now provided by some of the public cloud vendors. In a sense, this extends the speed layer to the edge. When these capabilities are deployed at the edge, you will need to consider CPU and memory sizing implications when sizing the field gateway platforms.

Within the speed layer that is deployed in a central location, the packaging of components varies among vendors. Among various public cloud vendors focused on IIoT solutions, the following functionality can be found in their offerings and/or those of their partners:

IoT hubs that enable device to cloud (D2C) via messaging protocols and cloud to device (C2D) communications contain information about the smart devices, support revocable access control for devices, enable operations modeling, and support message routing to event hubs or service buses

Event hubs without the management capabilities of the IoT hub, but specifically designed for just handling rapid message ingress with data transfer rates of up to 1 MB/second typical in cloud deployment

Streaming analytics engines providing a place to analyze data in motion with using machine learning algorithms or to view the current streaming data through business intelligence tools.

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