As the internet of things (IoT) market has evolved, it has gone from the hype of connected everything to the struggle of connecting everything. As organizations have taken on IoT projects, they may learn that going it alone, or with a proprietary provider, can mean risking the flexibility and enhancements they may need in the future. In the interest of completing initial milestones, single-purpose IoT solutions could be adopted, or easier-to-get-started solutions could lure organizations into an infrastructure that could lock them in.

Red Hat joining technologies with Cloudera and Eurotech in an end-to-end architecture for the IoT could help make a difference in providing future-proofing to meet the evolving needs of the IoT. Based on open source projects from The Apache Software Foundation and Eclipse Foundation, the architecture is being driven by contributions and improvements from open source community members. Red Hat, Cloudera, and Eurotech have hardened these projects into an enterprise-ready architecture. The open architecture can be run in an organization’s choice of environments, including on-premises or on public, private, and hybrid clouds.

The modular nature of the architecture offers enterprises the ability to choose the modules that can suit their needs. The scalable features of this solution can help protect existing technology investments and help provide the flexibility to add modules as the IoT environment grows or changes. The key components of the architecture include:

Connected "things" that generate data and need additional functionality designed for security, management, and protocol translation.

An intelligent IoT stack to support data ingestion and control and enable analytics at the edge.

An IoT integration hub to manage disparate devices and control the operational flow of data directly to enterprise applications for input, or to a data management platform for analysis.

A data management and analytics platform for IoT data processing, persistent storage, analytics, and machine learning to enable deeper business insights and actionable intelligence.

An application development, delivery, and integration environment to create cloud-native applications with DevOps disciplines, and integrate to distributed IoT and traditional applications.

To see how these components work together, this figure provides an in-depth look at the functionality of an end-to-end architecture.

The combination of these technologies can also offer:

Device connectivity and management Application development and deployment Data ingestion, enterprise application integration and data analytics Machine learning that can provide intelligence at the edge

The architecture also provides pre-integrated features designed to provide greater security and manageability across devices, access, authentication, and applications, as well as data that is in-motion and at-rest. By combining their solutions, Cloudera, Eurotech and Red Hat have designed an architecture that harnesses the power of community innovation, can help contain costs, and can avoid vendor lock-in.

To learn more about the architecture, register for this topical webinar, read the solution brief, and watch our video of the architecture in action.