Extending Cloud Beyond the Cloud

This is a guest post from Kevin Walsh, advisory board member at Vitalpointz.

There was a time, not too long ago, when phrases like “private cloud” or “on prem” were forbidden within the offices of cloud providers. The mindset was clearly that everything – and they meant every single thing – ran better as a workload in the cloud.

And while it certainly is the case that most things run more reliably and less expensively in the cloud, Internet of Things (IoT) technology and use cases have changed the cloud-only mentality (or, at least, changed the meaning of “cloud”). By definition, a workload running on a thing cannot run in the cloud. But also, it clearly must run in conjunction with the cloud. Does the thing connect to the cloud or does the cloud extend to the thing?

Recent advances in IoT software tools and platforms create an infrastructure in which the traditional boundaries of the cloud are blurred and extended out to potentially millions of endpoints with compute horsepower and massive date generating capacity. This extension of cloud infrastructure beyond the boundaries of the data center is happening at all major cloud providers and portends a rich trove of new applications and use cases that can be engineered by business and industrial users.

Key to achieving that “cloud extension” is the ability to rapidly establish the foundational underpinnings for a robust IoT infrastructure. This foundation, which Vitalpointz delivers, includes:

• Device onboarding and subsequent lifecycle management (including initial connectivity, device authentication, certificate management and periodic over-the-air software and configuration updates)
• MQTT & secure-MQTT traffic ingestion and normalization
• User authentication
• Drag-and-drop flow processing for ingested data streams
• Alerts and notifications
• Data visualization

Our vitalpointz IoT Core Lite product allows developers to quickly build IoT infrastructure and onboard devices so that they can focus on application development on top of that infrastructure and integration with disparate enterprise systems.

We are delighted to share that vitalpointz IoT Core Lite is now available as a 1-Click App in the DigitalOcean Marketplace! We look forward to continuing to stretch and extend the definition of "cloud" together.