Microservices suite for smart city applications

Smart Cities are approaching the Internet of Things (IoT) World. Most of the first-generation Smart City solutions are based on Extract Transform Load (ETL); processes and languages that mainly support pull protocols for data gathering. IoT solutions are moving forward to event-driven processes using push protocols. Thus, the concept of IoT applications has turned out to be widespread; but it was initially “implemented” with ETL; rule-based solutions; and finally; with true data flows. In this paper, these aspects are reviewed, highlighting the requirements for smart city IoT applications and in particular, the ones that implement a set of specific MicroServices for IoT Applications in Smart City contexts. Moreover; our experience has allowed us to implement a suite of MicroServices for Node-RED; which has allowed for the creation of a wide range of new IoT applications for smart cities that includes dashboards, IoT Devices, data analytics, discovery, etc., as well as a corresponding Life Cycle. The proposed solution has been validated against a large number of IoT applications, as it can be verified by accessing the https://www.Snap4City.org portal; while only three of them have been described in the paper. In addition, the reported solution assessment has been carried out by a number of smart city experts. The work has been developed in the framework of the Select4Cities PCP (PreCommercial Procurement), funded by the European Commission as Snap4City platform

Designing a Smart City Internet of Things Platform with Microservice Architecture

The Internet of Things (IoT) is being adopted in different application domains and is recognized as one of the key enablers of the Smart City vision. Despite the standard-ization efforts and wide adoption of Web standards and cloud computing technologies, however, building large-scale Smart City IoT platforms in practice remains challenging. The dynamically changing IoT environment requires these systems to be able to scale and evolve over time adopting new technologies and requirements. In response to the similar challenges in building large-scale distributed applications and platforms on the Web, microservice architecture style has emerged and gained a lot of popularity in the industry in recent years. In this work, we share our early experience of applying the microservice architecture style to design a Smart City IoT platform. Our experience suggests significant benefits provided by this architectural style compared to the more generic Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approaches, as well as highlights some of the challenges it introduces

Microservices-based IoT Applications Scheduling in Edge and Fog Computing: A Taxonomy and Future Directions

Edge and Fog computing paradigms utilise distributed, heterogeneous and resource-constrained devices at the edge of the network for efficient deployment of latency-critical and bandwidth-hungry IoT application services. Moreover, MicroService Architecture (MSA) is increasingly adopted to keep up with the rapid development and deployment needs of the fast-evolving IoT applications. Due to the fine-grained modularity of the microservices along with their independently deployable and scalable nature, MSA exhibits great potential in harnessing both Fog and Cloud resources to meet diverse QoS requirements of the IoT application services, thus giving rise to novel paradigms like Osmotic computing. However, efficient and scalable scheduling algorithms are required to utilise the said characteristics of the MSA while overcoming novel challenges introduced by the architecture. To this end, we present a comprehensive taxonomy of recent literature on microservices-based IoT applications scheduling in Edge and Fog computing environments. Furthermore, we organise multiple taxonomies to capture the main aspects of the scheduling problem, analyse and classify related works, identify research gaps within each category, and discuss future research directions.Comment: 35 pages, 10 figures, submitted to ACM Computing Survey

Incremental Integration of Microservices in Cloud Applications

Microservices have recently appeared as a new architectural style that is native to the cloud. The high availability and agility of the cloud demands organizations to migrate or design microservices, promoting the building of applications as a suite of small and cohesive services (microservices) that are independently developed, deployed and scaled. Current cloud development approaches do not support the incremental integration needed for microservice platforms, and the agility of getting new functionalities out to customers is consequently affected by the lack of support for the integration design and automation of the development and deployment tasks. This paper presents an approach for the incremental integration of microservices that will allow developers to specify and design microservice integration, and provide mechanisms with which to automatically obtain the implementation code for business logic and interoperation among microservices along with deployment and architectural reconfiguration scripts specific to the cloud environment in which the microservice will be deployed

An IoT Platform Based on Microservices and Serverless Paradigms for Smart Farming Purposes

Nowadays, the concept of “Everything is connected to Everything” has spread to reach increasingly diverse scenarios, due to the benefits of constantly being able to know, in real-time, the status of your factory, your city, your health or your smallholding. This wide variety of scenarios creates different challenges such as the heterogeneity of IoT devices, support for large numbers of connected devices, reliable and safe systems, energy efficiency and the possibility of using this system by third-parties in other scenarios. A transversal middleware in all IoT solutions is called an IoT platform. the IoT platform is a piece of software that works like a kind of “glue” to combine platforms and orchestrate capabilities that connect devices, users and applications/services in a “cyber-physical” world. In this way, the IoT platform can help solve the challenges listed above. This paper proposes an IoT agnostic architecture, highlighting the role of the IoT platform, within a broader ecosystem of interconnected tools, aiming at increasing scalability, stability, interoperability and reusability. For that purpose, different paradigms of computing will be used, such as microservices architecture and serverless computing. Additionally, a technological proposal of the architecture, called SEnviro Connect, is presented. This proposal is validated in the IoT scenario of smart farming, where five IoT devices (SEnviro nodes) have been deployed to improve wine production. A comprehensive performance evaluation is carried out to guarantee a scalable and stable platform

Provalets: Component-Based Mobile Agents as Microservices for Rule-Based Data Access, Processing and Analytics

Provalets are mobile rule agents for rule-based data access, semantic processing, and inference analytics. They can be dynamically deployed as microservices from Maven repositories into standardized container environments such as OSGi, where they can be used via simple REST calls. The programming model supports rapid prototyping and reuse of Provalets components to build Linked Enterprise Data applications where the sensible corporate data is not transmitted outside the enterprise, but instead the Provalets providing data processing and knowledge inference capabilities are moved closer to the data