IoT Edge Design – DESIGN.GOTHE.SE

Preview 2 is the first available beta for the new Watson IoT Platform Edge capabilities. This article describes the design objectives and the user experience design for this preview version of IoT Edge.

In 2018 I delivered a design on the IoT Edge developer experience in the Watson IoT Platform.

What is IoT Edge?

Edge devices generally live on the edge of the network within an enterprise. They are specific hardware sensors, industrial controllers, or other industrial devices residing on private or potentially proprietary networks at a physical location.

Edge devices are creating quite a challenge for systems integrators since most are generally building cloud-based applications which rely on receiving information from IoT devices to accomplish the business goal.

There are many challenges that exist in developing a path for this information flow, including

Latency vs Time
Quality vs Time
Bandwidth and Cost
Security and Vulnerability
Compliance
Maintenance and operations

Read more about my design research on the IoT Edge experience in the Watson IoT Platform

Design Research on IoT Edge
Design research on the IoT Edge experience in the Watson IoT Platform.

Hills

The Hills for IoT Edge may be viewed as a stack of capabilities that deliver value to the Business and the Solution.

“Chris, an IoT application developer, can develop and deploy applications that are transparent to the instrumentation of devices at the edge”

Hill 1 formulates the transparency of IoT Edge to solution development.

“Devon, an IoT Edge developer, can develop workloads for the edge using common cloud programming models, and automate workload distribution, management and updates on Edge Gateways”

Hill 2 expresses the WOW on adopting new Cloud programming models for the IoT Edge and moving away from the constraints of monolithic FW.

“Dave, an IoT Ecosystem Partner, can deliver IoT Gateway products with edge capabilities, managed by the IoT Edge”

Hill 3 that states the value to the partner ecosystem to leverage the IoT Edge as a platform for delivering edge-based services by shipping on or shipping with.

Design Vision

Chris, the IoT Application developer, can develop code to work with state and conditions of manageable assets, without knowledge of individual instrumentation, data workload distribution, or network connection state.

Using IoT Edge, Chris can

Create Edge Gateway types, select IoT Edge capabilities, and register Gateways, using the IoT Platform UI and APIs
Provision IoT Core capabilities to IoT Edge gateways
Distribute Data Management workloads to the edge to Filter Messages and Compute Device Device State and submit State Change Events
Connect devices to the Gateway to Ingest, Store and Forward MQTT messages
Develop and deliver cloud applications, independently of changes made to the edge instrumentation

Devon the IoT Edge developer, can develop workloads for the edge using common cloud programming models, and automatically distribute, manage and update workloads on Edge Gateways.

Using IoT Edge, Devon can

Create, build and upload custom containers to the IoT Edge component registry
Provision, Update and Manage custom containers on IoT Edge Gateways
Use the local MQTT message bus in IoT Core, to integrate messaging across custom containers, devices, and cloud
Create and test Cloud Functions on the cloud and configure as edge followers to run at the edge
Create aggregation of devices into Things
Create Rules and Actions, using Device and Thing state, and distribute as workloads to the edge

UX design

The User Experience of IoT Edge has three major parts

IoT Edge extensions to Watson IoT Platform Gateway Types
IoT Edge extensions to Watson IoT Platform Gateways
New IoT Edge Services

Developers will use existing concepts of IoT Platform Gateway Types. By choosing the option to make a Gateway an IoT Edge Gateway, developers get access to additional capabilities when defining a gateway type. The new capabilities are introduced together with the existing gateway properties or added as new tabs.

When adding a new Edge Gateway Type, a developer will create a gateway type, select the Edge option, and then choose the hardware architecture for gateways of this type. The options are Intelx86, ARM32, ARM64.

The developer can also optionally select Edge Services that will run on gateways of this type. The developer can browse the Edge Service Catalog for a list of services and available versions for gateways of this architecture. The latest version is shown by default. Alternatively, a different version can be viewed and selected.

For developers that want to get an overview of available Edge Services, the Edge Service Catalog is available for browsing and exploring the Docker images that have been configured for a service.