Why Container Technology Will Consume the Internet of Things World

Container technology is one of the most fascinating technologies of our day, with its ability to bundle and deliver a program and its dependencies in a secure, isolated, and lightweight runtime environment. It is rapidly being utilized within online firms and enterprise IT. We now understand that this technology has enormous benefits for the Internet of Things (IoT) and the industrial internet because it allows us to manage some of the related deployment, scalability, security, and operating difficulties with grace.

An IoT system is divided into three architectural tiers: the edge tier, the core tier, and the application tier. Container advantages are recognized at each stage, resulting in fast adoption. The edge tier of an Internet of Things system comprises sensors, gateways controllers/actuators, routers, and other components installed at remote locations. These devices are often resource-constrained embedded systems running lightweight operating systems. The systems provide data collecting, edge analytics, data filtering, control logic, as well as other services and communication to the core tier.

We are seeing the introduction of specific container runtimes for embedded devices and the containerization of edge services. The latter improves their security and isolation abilities. Services can execute with low rights and in isolation from other services or applications. Because there are no performance overheads, it is ideal for systems with limited CPU and memory resources. Furthermore, these services can be scalable when delivered through cloud-connected hubs/repositories or markets.

Data stream ingestion, transformation, filtering, stream processing, business logic, event-driven actions, and analytics workloads are common components of the core tier. Micro-services architecture is increasingly being used in current IoT key systems to realize these workloads. Micro-services and containers are a perfect match. Lightweight application containers interacting via message passing are used to launch micro-service instances. As an added benefit, container orchestration solutions provide load balancing, high availability, and failover.

Most industrial internet applications must not only integrate with sensors and devices but also ingest data from external files, databases, and online services. Traditional ETL workloads, we believe, will be widespread on the industrial internet and will progressively shift to containers.

Function-as-a-Service is the next big thing in cloud computing, and many (if not all) FaaS systems are built with container technology. Apache Open and Whisk Amazon Lambda are two examples of such systems. In the future, the need for FaaS will be a typical trend in IoT applications. In the industrial internet, an example of FaaS would be cameras recording photos of an industrial product that are then utilized by an AI-based model employing FaaS to detect faulty items via image processing. The service would run a Lambda function whenever a picture is loaded into image storage (a blob store) to trigger the AI model.

Container-based deployments are rapidly growing across all industries. Technology firms, independent software vendors, and open-source initiatives are increasingly releasing support for packaging their goods as containerized apps. Enterprises should begin due diligence investigations, baseline their existing IoT infrastructure and apps, and develop a strategy and plan for container adoption.

Container-based deployments are rapidly growing across all industries. Technology firms, independent software vendors, and open-source initiatives are increasingly releasing support for packaging their goods as containerized apps. Enterprises should begin due diligence investigations, baseline their existing IoT infrastructure and apps, and develop a strategy and plan for container adoption.