5 reasons why you will fail at scaling your

IoT system.

Sander  Mertens,  Solutions  Architect  

(and how to prevent this from happening)

Reason  1:  Data  is  not  available  everywhere,  all  the  time.

IoT systems are inherently partitioned due to unreliable connectivity: internet, 3G, etc…

The CAP theorem states you cannot have your cake and eat it too.

you can only have two out of three…

Since we cannot get rid of the ‘P’ and don’t WANT to get rid of the ‘A’ …

Consistency will have to give!

Using strong Consistency everywhere will NOT scale because either: - The system won’t tolerate spotty connections (resulting in Partitioning) - The system will have low Availability

Therefore use eventual consistency where you can! It has been proven to be efficient and sufficient in many (business critical) large-scale IoT systems.

Reason  2:  Discovery  cripples  the  infrastructure.

<100 devices We’re doing great!

100 - 500 devices We’ll perform some tricks.

500 - 10000 devices We’ll throw more hardware at it.

10000 - 100000 devices We’ll throw dedicated expensive

hardware at it.

100000 - >1000000 devices Oh my…

Device discovery will bring your system to its knees if not managed properly.

Most COTS solutions are either ridiculously expensive or very static.

Check out Vortex Cloud - it tackles the discovery problem quite elegantly and runs on commodity hardware!

Reason  3:  Single  points  of  failure  everywhere.

A service crashes… Oops. I just lost a critical

system component.

A service crashes… No problem. My data

is still there.

VS

Traditional service/message centric architectures such as CORBA/RMI/MQTT are either prone to failure or expensive to make fault tolerant …

… whilst with the right infrastructure data can be much more resilient

than services. Decoupling services from data invariably results in cheaper infrastructure, higher availability and increased fault-tolerance.

Modern technologies such as OMG-DDS support the data-centric paradigm in which data, not the service, is made a first-class citizen!

Service Centric

Data Centric

Reason  4:  Bandwidth  is  wasted.  

Nobody  Cares.

My  position  is  (3,3)!

My  position  is  (2,2)!

My  position  is  (1,1)!

Devices typically publish data at fixed frequencies, providing regular updates to a “cloud” or similar infrastructure.

More often than not, this data is not relevant all the time but is published

nonetheless. This can cause cellular bills to blow up and waste lots of bandwidth.

Take a look at how Vortex solves the bandwidth challenge! Its unique, elastic DDS based data-fabric causes your applications to only ever send data for which there is

interest, at the right rate.

Reason  5:  Systems  are  too  costly  to  evolve.

?

IoT systems must be able to survive in extremely competitive environments where innovation is continuous. However, unmanaged system-evolution results inevitably in

unmanageable complexity.

A new agile architecture is required to solve the problems that make traditional service centric systems hard to evolve. The data fabric provided by OMG-DDS

decouples services while providing graceful evolution of the data!

Want  to  learn  more?

Check  out  the  resource  section  of  our  website  for  live  webcasts,  whitepapers  and  more!

Thank  You!