An exploration into building a solution in the cloud
There is no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to building an IoT solution. Our approach to guidance is to embark on a collaborative journey into understanding the mechanics and challenges surrounding an end-to-end system. Our purpose is not to tell you all the answers that you'll need, but rather to help you ask the right questions.
We will be constructing an IoT solution hosted in Azure. Our focus will be on problems related to the back-end architecture, such as:
- high-scale event ingestion
- event stream processing
- facilitation of analysis
We will be using the same tools and services that are available to you. Instead of a single final snapshot of our source code, we'll be sharing the history and intermediate releases. We'll grow the reference implementation (our fancy name for an end-to-end sample) over time; responding to new business requirements and taking advantage of new services as they are released.
In addition to the source code, we'll also produce a set of written articles covering the general concepts and patterns, the rationale behind design choices, and a few other things to help you navigate the guidance.
We intend this to be an interactive act of discovery.
We've constructed a scenario that reflects business requirements we've gathered from customers and advisors. The scenario is not meant to be realistic, but rather representative. That is, it should represent the most common needs and challenges you will face.
📝 We'd like your immediate feedback on the scenario to help make sure that it is truly representative.
We'll use this scenario to define our backlog for the reference implementation. Both the scenario and backlog will change over time. We'll deliberately break the scenario up into milestones. Each milestone will have a specific set of goals, deliverables, and target date. We will tag the source as a release at the end of each milestone. Our engineering team will be working in two week iterations against the backlog.
We will also establish an advisory council with regular meetings. The council will be asked to continuously review our work and provide critical feedback.
Likewise, we intend to keep the conversation open. Any and all feedback is welcome.
Our intended audience for this guidance is any senior developer or architect interested in developing an IoT solution. We want all developers, regardless of their preferred development stack, to benefit from the written guidance. If you feel that there is anything more that we can do to make this guidance accessible to a broader audience, you are encouraged to share.
If something doesn't make sense, start with the FAQ. If that doesn't help join the conversation on gitter or open an issues. If you want to contribute directly, please review our contribution guidelines.
