Microservices the Ball-Bearings Running IOT

The IOT Advent

If each atom of earth is assigned an IPv6 address we will be still left with enough addresses to cover 100 earths.  As of today, every 'Thing' on the planet which can be assigned an IPv6 address for unique identification and transfer of data over network is 'Internet of Things'. It can be your shoe, hat, bed, dog, cat etc. Together this system of interrelated computing devices, working to provide varying data/information/solutions is called IOT or Internet of Things.

It is important to note only four important characteristics are needed to qualify for the world of IOT:

--It has to be a thing 😀

--It should have a unique identifier

--It should have over the network data transfer capability

--Removal of humans from the default data generation and transmission

The birth of IOT has been a result of the happy marriage between the Internet and wireless technologies. This marriage aims to build the fancy IOT world removing humans with micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and let them interact using Microservices. Unstructured machine generated data gets analyzed using Information Technology and gets converted/transmitted to an input required by another 'thing' on the internet, setting up a chain of connected 'Internet of Things'. So the walls between Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) are removed in the IOT world.

Why Microservices fit in IOT World

Why Microservices for IOT, when SOA was already there? SOA proposed in nineties and flourishing until recently began to look insufficient with the advent of big data and could. Now with cloud and big data being a common solution, a new architecture was needed to fulfill new requirements. Hence microservices were adapted as a solution to the new challenges of distributed household computing requirements. The complexity of distributed yet collaborated computing could be reduced by features of Microservices architecture, such as each service is independent process, self-sufficient, deployable anywhere on the network, having data driven interfaces with minimal input and output. By design data management becomes decentralized as each microservice will have its own suitable data and data store. These features also make granular governance of microservices possible.

It’s growing with its pros and cons

While the advantages of microservices are making it popular in IOT implementations but challenges/concerns also remain. For example each microservice in a platform can be developed in a different language – C, Java, C++, Python, etc; but interoperability among vendors remain a concern. With ever increasing number of interfaces, security is another major concern for microservices which needs to be addressed in the ever growing world of IOT.