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The standard IoT solution

The following diagram shows the standard IoT solution that you would take for your high-tech vending machines:

Arguably the world's first IoT device was a network-connected altered Coke machine developed by graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University ( CMU) in the early 1980s. The students from this school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania found their Coke machine was located inconveniently far away. Many times, a trip down to the machine resulted in finding a machine void of Coke, or worse, Cokes that were too warm. The application they developed not only told them if a Coke was available but also whether or not the Cokes in the machine were cold.

As you can see from the preceding diagram, each vending machine sends sensory information to the cloud, where an IoT dashboard arranges it in a clean interface. You are able to view your IoT dashboard on any device you choose, whether that be a PC, tablet, or cell phone.

Business is going really well. You can't keep up with demand. You are rolling out new vending machines as fast as you can. As a result, your dashboard is constantly having to keep up with more and more data coming in. Your IoT software vendor can't keep up with the increasing demand on its systems. Your sensory data is competing with the data coming in from the vendor's other customers. Your dashboard is no longer accurate. This is due to the inherent flaws of using the cloud to process simple telemetry data. It simply takes too long and is too inefficient to send sensory data up to the cloud. As well, your cellular data costs are too high, as each vending machine is constantly sending sensory data to the cloud even if the data has not changed.

How can you improve your architecture? Using an edge analytics approach could be the answer to these issues.