Client Overview
The client offers carrier-grade IoT Platform (SaaS/PaaS) to implement disruptive Internet of Things solutions. It enables service providers, enterprises, manufacturers, and governments to integrate and white-label, value-added IoT services with their best-of-breed products and solutions across smart home, smart city, security, digital health, energy, e-government, and other vertical markets
Business Challenge
The client wanted to develop end-to-end cloud-based IoT platform-as-a-service with below mentioned requirements, to offer to its customers as per subscription-based model:
- IoT solutions focused team with implementation knowledge of four key components of cloud-based IoT platform as a service: IoT device embedded application, IoT device cloud connectivity SDK, IoT gateway stack, cloud IoT Platform-as-a-Service solution under one roof
- Dependable shoulder to receive support for multiple hardware platforms based IoT device connectivity by juggling different communication protocols and platforms available in the market.
- Extended team for
- Expediting end-to-end development and improvements
- Continuous integration, testing and deployment support
- Required off-shore partner to facilitate custom engineering and system integration requirements for a wide array of their customers
VOLANSYS Contribution
VOLANSYS developed the cloud-based device management platform including:
- Embedded application kit and cloud connectivity SDK for IoT edge devices and gateway
- Developed an application support SDK that abstracts the underlying SDK/HW platform and enables rapid IoT solution development
- Support to IoT features like Wi-Fi provisioning, device control, and monitoring, command line commands, etc.
- Developed a cloud agent to establish and maintain the device’s session with the cloud
- Developed APIs to send/receive data from the cloud
- Implemented AES – 265-bit encryption using pre-shared and Dynamic Key exchange for securing the connection
- Ported library on Atmel, Marvell, Freescale and TI platforms
- Cloud based IoT Platform
- Supported, stabilized, validated and maintained previously developed cloud to meet business SLA
- CI/CD support for quick, safe and consistent deployment
- Features implementation:
- IoT device connectivity and control services
- IoT device communication through MQTT
- Multi-tenant cloud architecture
- Load Balancer to support multiple policies
- Device Broker for module communication
- Rule and alert engine
- User identity and access management
- OAuth and MFA support
- IoT data analytics (Solr, Elasticsearch and Kibana)
- Cloud to cloud integrations (Nest, Alexa, Google Home)
- Database backup, upgrade, and migrations (SQL to NoSQL)
- DevOps
- Implemented CI/CD for deployment and validation (Ansible, AWS, Docker, Librato)
- Executed Jenkins Job to trigger on code commit for static-code-analysis, automated test and code coverage verification to auto approve pull requests
- Implemented Ansible Role & Jobs, Jenkins Jobs, and Vagrant Scripts for continuous deployment on weekly builds
- Built setup for load and stress testing
- End-to-End Quality Engineering, Maintenance and Support
- Functional Testing – integration, simulation
- Non-Functional Testing – performance, scalability, security
- Automated cloud, web, device, and infrastructure (Sanity & Smoke test) validation
- Load and stress testing with device simulator developed in-house
- Weekly build support
Solution Architecture
Benefits Delivered
- Helped their customers by eliminating hardware platform dependency, reduced memory footprint and CPU utilization for Cloud Connect Library to have less footprint and more processing cycles available for customer application
- Helped customer by designing highly scalable cloud solution architecture with ability to support up to 150K devices
- Reduced time of testing and ongoing releases by achieving 95% test automation – automated 600+ test cases out of 1500+ manual test cases reducing 1-month testing effort to 4-5 hours
- Improved the CI/CD process of a customer by reducing overall deployment time by 90% – automation deployment reduced former 6-8 hours of time to 30-45 minutes which lead their customer benefit of providing faster upgrades to cloud platform