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Yash Bansal
Yash Bansal

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Designing IoT Systems: A Practical Framework for Edge, Cloud, and Hybrid Computing

When working on an IoT application, the first architecture decision to make is:

where to process the data?

The standard answer is "edge or cloud."
That's not a very interesting distinction.

A much better approach is to classify each workload according to its latency, connectivity needs, data volume, reliability requirements, and CPU/memory needs.

This article is about a practical framework for determining where an IoT workload should be processed.

Start With the Data Flow

An industrial grade IoT system will often resemble this:

Sensors / Devices
↓
Local Gateway
↓
Edge Processing Layer
↓
Network / Message Broker
↓
Cloud Platform
↓
Analytics / AI / Storage
↓
Dashboards / Applications

The important thing is that not every data point has to go all the way up the stack.

For example:

Temperature Sensor
↓
Edge Rule Engine
↓
Temperature Normal?
↙ ↘
Yes No
↓ ↓
Aggregate Send Alert
↓

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