Design of a Reference Architecture for Serverless IoT Systems
Neel Shah · 2021
The Internet of Things (IoT) proposes the concept of a global and pervasive network of heterogeneous devices that interact with the users and their surroundings improving work efficiency and quality of life. From the conventional software systems development perspective, a good system design and architecture are critical. Its importance increases many-fold when the domain’s objective is to connect an infinite set of heterogeneous devices, i.e., smaller systems should integrate and interoperate with each other with no or low modifications. Therefore, a consensus from a design perspective must be achieved in the community and the corporations working in the IoT domain to achieve this integrability and interoperability. One way to document this consensus is a reference architecture. This paper proposes a reference architecture that will act as a blueprint in developing Serverless IoT systems that integrate and interoperate with each other easily. The motivation behind selecting the serverless computing paradigm for IoT systems is that the system engineers can incorporate more decentralization. Thus, a significant amount of tasks will be handled at the Edge and the Fog layer. Only the heavy functions will be delegated to the Cloud, resulting in more efficient and inexpensive systems. Also, the event-driven programming model at the core of serverless computing, its advantages in scalability, focus on the core business logic, and high cohesion becomes necessary and valuable tools in the toolbox for efficiently developing IoT systems.