IoT Management with Container Orchestration

Internet of Things (IoT) systems manage microcontroller devices through cloud infrastructure. The modern cloud infrastructure is composed of containerized applications that facilitate internal and external communications. Containers have been used in recent years in a wide range of applications. Containerization of applications and services allows improved modularity for traditional monolithic applications. Combined with IoT, containerization allows efficient allocation, fast execution, and deployment of hardware resources. Docker is the most popular and open-source containerization tool currently used in the field. However, the need to manage these various containers warranted the advent of container orchestration technologies to facilitate the deployment, status monitoring, and scaling of containerized applications. In this study, the container management engine Kubernetes was implemented through the Google Cloud Platform to create an IoT infrastructure composed of containers. The infrastructure used the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. The design of the IoT infrastructure also involved system architecture trade-off analysis of architectural alternatives. The process improves both functional and nonfunctional requirements such as reliability, maintainability, and scalability. The implemented IoT infrastructure in potential applications and reliable for failure scenarios had containers and container orchestration in the Google Kubernetes Engine. The orchestration infrastructure facilitates efficient and effective management of IoT devices.