Yesterday, I had an amazing opportunity to participate in the inaugural
Internet of Things (IoT) Expo held at Fisherman’s Wharf in San
Francisco. The event was conceived by Jeremy Geelan who is also behind
the highly successful Cloud Expo events.
The IoT Expo was well attended with many excellent keynotes and product
demonstrations. Among others, industry leaders such as Tony Shakib (VP,
IoT vertical at Cisco), Omri Lachman (Co-Founder and CEO Humavox), and
Joe Speed (Director of IoT at the Linux Foundation) gave us very
compelling insights into what IoT can achieve, its potential, as well as
issues that still need to be solved for. Later in the day, I
participated in a panel discussion with Peter Moskovits (Kaazing) and
David Nielsen (Cloud Computing Evangelist and Consultant) around the
following questions:
1. What is it about the present that allows us to consider the IoT as a practical, and real thing?
Does anyone remember Microsoft SPOT? This was the first real connected smart watch for the masses and it was available 10 years ago. While one can argue that there were a lot of things missing, MS did get some things right: https://gigaom.com/2013/09/03/what-microsoft-got-right-with-its-smartwatch-nearly-a-decade-ago-more-than-you-think/ The SPOT may have been too far ahead of its time to be successful. If you look at current trends, the cost of fabrication and components has gone down tremendously in the last decade along with a sharp decrease in form factor. Today, you can actually fit a camera or a computer into something that measures 1 cu. mm. Or, how about IPv6? With nearly 100 Internet addresses now available for each atom on the planet, we can connect all the devices we want and still have addresses to spare! Lastly, communications such as Wi-Fi, Broadband, Zigbee, and RFID have all improved by leaps and bounds.
2. So what are some of the things that can hold IoT back?
Two things come to mind. First, connected devices need to be able to speak amongst themselves and not just to their command and control. In other words, we cannot have an IoT for Verizon, one for MS, one for Cisco etc. We need to ensure devices speak a common language or we will learn from the Tower of Babel! The second area that can be worrisome is security. If Heartbleed scared us, you can imagine the panic and mayhem that could be caused if these devices are broken into and altered to take different (than intended) action. From a CFEngine perspective our highly-distributed architecture enables us to play a very important role when it comes to IoT. It is predicted that there will be over 50 billion connected devices by 2025! Which means that IoT is all about scale - and CFEngine is built to handle scale. Across our deployments we routinely manage tens of thousands of machines. We also have a spotless track record when it comes to security vulnerabilities. Zero to be exact. Lastly, the most important reason CFEngine will be the preferred automation platform for connected devices is our lightweight and autonomous end-point agents that can be embedded into the smallest of environments. This autonomy is at the heart of CFEngine and gives our agents independent decision-making capabilities instead of the typical master-slave, top-down approach to IT management. This will be increasingly important as connected devices grow in number and become more pervasive. We closed the panel talking about some unique use cases across industries such as medical devices where CFEngine is playing a key role ensuring connected devices perform as needed. CFEngine is at the forefront of IoT and we look forward to more participation in these discussions going forward. If you have a unique IoT story or are currently leveraging CFEngine in a unique way, we would love to hear from you!
