Anand Tamboli - Build Your Own IoT Platform: Develop a Flexible and Scalable Internet of Things Platform in 24 Hours, 2nd Edition

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Anyone searching online for the term IoT platform will be shown at least 200 million results within a second. This is the level of proliferation that IoT has achieved (particularly IoT platforms) in the past several years. The IoT platform is an integral part of any IoT solution, underscoring the importance of having this platform well built.

Whether you develop a bespoke platform, buy it as an off-the-shelf product, or subscribe to the service, it will mean a lot to your final product. Moreover, the term IoT platform has many connotations, and vendors have overused it to a point where it does not convey anything meaningful.

As businesses and working scenarios keep evolving, I see many smaller companies delving into IoT. However, not having your own IoT platform is one of the impediments to this evolution. The easy and lazy answer is availableit is to use a freemium, free trial, or a third-party platform.

But what lies ahead is a greater challenge. When things scale, costs skyrocket exponentially. You will find yourself locked in when the trial expires, or freemium is not enough. Switching over is neither simple nor easy.

Additionally, buying an off-the-shelf solution often means that you subordinate requirements or retrofit things to suit what is available. As a result, you might end up building a subpar solution, if not an outright bad one. If having full flexibility and control means something to you, this book is for you.

I chose to write this book as I saw many of my customers struggling to understand the IoT platform landscape. Unfortunately, the state of the play has not been balanced, with many vendors convoluting the offering to make it look like the greatest thing ever built. They have raised artificial constraints for short-term gains and showed superficial problems that only their offering can solve.

I believe in empowering customers, and this book is a humble attempt to do it.

The book is not about building a full-blown enterprise-grade system. It is about being agile in a true sense and reducing time to the market without breaking the bank. It is about designing something that you can scale incrementally without doing a lot of rework or disrupting your current state of the work.

If you are a small- to medium-sized company or part of the development team at a non-IT company, you will find this book quite useful. If you are an independent developer, researcher, or learner, you will see the usefulness of the content for your endeavors too. Finally, you will find this hands-on book equally useful whether you are new to the programming world or have basic to intermediate programming skills.

The book supports the idea of being frugal at the start and then investing only when and where necessary. It would help you tap into technology advancements without bank-breaking budgets and get off the ground quickly, contrary to the longer times required to adapt to the off-the-shelf or freemium platforms. More importantly, you will fully control what you are developing throughout the process.

Throughout 15 chapters of this book, I guide you through the step-by-step process of building your own IoT platform. Of course, there are must-haves and nice-to-haves; I will distinguish between the two and focus on how to build the must-haves. As a result, you will not only save heaps but also enjoy a control-wielding and satisfying learning experience.

Chapter discusses the necessary and sufficient qualities that any IoT platform must have and why. I also elaborate on the key question of why you should build your own.

Building your own means understanding at the ecosystem level is important; we do that in Chapter , where block diagramlevel details of the IoT platform are discussed.

Better planning is a key to success that reduces confusion and agony later. So, I cover a platform wish list and the technical and general requirements for building our platform in Chapters .

The rubber actually hits the road in Chapter , where we initialize the cloud instance, install the required software stack, and apply security. If you are eager to jump into the how of building things, this is where you might want to start (and read about the why later).

One of the core elements of the platform is a two-way messaging system bus, which is explained in Chapter , along with the installation of broker software and securing it.

Building critical platform components and the message broker extension with additional functionality are covered in Chapter .

In Chapter .

In Chapter , we add documentation and provide the testing facility for developers with the interactive API documentation.

The response was awesome after we published the first edition back in 2019. However, every second person I met or interacted with online suggested that a little bit about hardware interfacing with this platform could have helped. Moreover, quite a few people pointed out that it would put things in perspective if I discussed real-life use cases where this platform has been used. Considering all these inputs and feedback over the past few years, I am happy to add three more chapters to this edition.

Chapter discusses various ways you could connect your hardware with this platform. Again, I am not going through low-level details per se; however, the principles discussed would help you execute them effectively.

Chapter discusses an interesting case study, where we (my team and I in Knewron Technologies) built a smart and better mousetrap for a few of our clients. I talk about the projects origin story, decision making for hardware and software selection, and some learning and takeaways.