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MANAGING THE IOT LIFECYCLE FROM DESIGN THROUGH END-OF-LIFE
A recent worldwide survey of developers found that, while a large majority expressed excitement about the opportunities created by the Internet of Things (IoT), around half are uncertain they have the skills and tools necessary to deliver on expectations.
So how can developers streamline and accelerate the development process, ensure application performance before deployment, and then efficiently deploy, manage, and monitor applications in the field remotely? To better understand the capabilities needed to address these challenges, it’s instructive to walk through the entire device lifecycle.
Design and Development
At the beginning of the development process, teams need easier ways to work with embedded hardware systems, collaborate across remote teams, and partner with other organizations. In addition, support for holistic security needs to be baked into any IoT device or application.
Testing and Debugging
Knowing that most IoT applications involve a complex infrastructure and have high performance expectations, developers need a way to test applications at scale prior to deployment.
Deployment
Once an application has been tested, developers need the means to deploy it easily to hundreds or thousands of devices in the field. This requires management tools that can scale and ensure that all devices are securely connected to the network and operating as they should.
Management
The most critical driver of value in an IoT system is the ability to unlock and extract data from devices, aggregate it, share it with business systems, analyze it, and make decisions based on that analysis. Often those decisions need to be automated by pushing data back to devices to modify their operations, completing a “round-trip” communication from the edge to the enterprise and back.
Decommissioning
Developers need to plan for the device’s end-of-life at the design stage. Operators need to be able to securely remove a device from service, ensuring that it is truly “dead” and does not expose a vulnerability that intruders could exploit.
Figure 1. The lifecycle of IoT systems is a continuous process of development, testing, deployment, and management
SIMPLIFYING IOT DEVELOPMENT
In order to overcome the complexity of IoT development, it’s important to think of the system lifecycle not as a sequence of discrete steps but as a continuous process. The key capabilities for managing the system lifecycle, therefore, need to be integrated. These capabilities would include tools for:
• Remote device management: Sending out engineers in “truck rolls” to maintain and upgrade devices in the field is simply not viable in large-scale IoT deployments. System operators need to be able to manage devices from a central location in a closed-loop system from provisioning to end-of-life.
• Virtualized application development: Developers need the ability to customize and reconfigure deployed devices with new applica- tions, using an abstracted target hardware platform that does not require proximity to an actual device.
• Modeling and testing: Development teams need the means to test applications at scale and debug prior to deployment, using simula- tion models capable of replicating the entire system across its com- plete lifecycle.
Finally, to enable distributed development teams to collaborate efficiently and effectively, it makes sense to house these tools in a secure cloud environment, whether on an internal server or through an external provider, that allows anywhere, anytime access to authorized developers.
Develop
Test
Deploy and Manage
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