Although this is from a factory automation perspective, I think the concepts generally apply to IoT and technology in general. Some notes from the talk:
industry 3.0 is solution driven, vertical integration where AB/Siemens/Schneider provides solutions in each layer of the stack where each layer only talks to adjacent layers and does not interoperate well with other vendors.
requirements
report by exception – only report when things change
edge driven – the intelligence pushes the payload, it is not polled
open architecture – accessible by all consumers
lightweight – don’t take down the network
promote Ignition by Inductive Automation
start with MQTT/Sparkplug B
all nodes are producers or consumers of data in a single, unified name-space
This provides a lot of food for thought. The tree based structure of data in Simple IoT would map nicely into a MQTT topic space and would provide a nice handle to reference node values vs the UUID of the node. However, one problem with a topic handle is the names may change, which could them break consumers. Needs a little more thought …
The context is industrial automation, but I think the principles apply to any distributed system architecture.
The old industry 3.0 approach is a layered approach:
This is the “solution” centered approach and drives you to one vendor where the entire stack is integrated, because connecting each layer to the layer above from different vendors is a huge integration effort.
Walker’s requirements:
report by exception (only report when something changes)
edge driven (data is pushed from edge, not pulled)
open architecture (accessible by all consumers)
light-weight
Implementation:
MQTT
Unified namespace
hub and spoke architecture where everything can talk to everything else
This is what you get with a technology driven architecture:
The difference between these two architectures is the effort it takes to add new things. In the layered (solution driven) architecture, you have to touch every layer and it is a huge integration effort. With the event (technology driven) architecture, it is easy to plug in new components.
Walker describes the solution driven approach as “nailing your furniture to the floor” – its very hard to change anything.
