What is IoT Edge
IoT Edge, also known as Link IoT Edge, extends the capabilities of Alibaba Cloud to the edge. It inherits Alibaba Cloud's capabilities in security, storage, computing, and artificial intelligence. You can deploy it on smart devices and computing nodes of various sizes. It connects devices that use different protocols and data formats by defining Thing Specification Language (TSL) models. IoT Edge provides secure, reliable, low-latency, cost-effective, and scalable local computing services that require minimal cloud dependency.
Additionally, IoT Edge combines Alibaba Cloud's capabilities in big data, AI, voice, and video to create an integrated computing architecture that spans the cloud, the edge, and devices.
Video introduction
IoT Edge provides the following core features:
Edge instances
An edge instance is a management feature that functions like a folder. You can use instances to manage edge-related gateways, sub-devices, scene orchestration, Function Compute, stream analytics, and message routing. When you deploy an instance, the resources within it are deployed to a gateway.
Device access
IoT Edge provides software development kits (SDKs) in multiple languages that allow you to easily connect devices to edge computing nodes.
Scene orchestration
Scene orchestration is a visual programming feature of the rules engine that you can use to develop automated business logic. You can visually define interaction rules between devices and deploy them to the cloud or the edge.
You can drag and drop visual components to manage, link, and control multiple devices locally. This allows anyone to program device interactions without writing code.
For example, you can link the "Open Door" and "Turn On Light" operations and set a time range between 18:00 and 19:00. This causes the light to turn on when the door is opened during that time.
Edge applications
Application Management is a feature of IoT Edge that helps you manage the versions and configurations of edge applications in a standardized way.
- Function Compute applications: Function Compute is a runtime framework that you can use to develop connections between devices and the edge gateway and create business logic based on device data and events. It supports a cloud product mode, which integrates with Alibaba Cloud Function Compute, and a local upload mode.
- Container image applications: These are edge applications based on container technology. You can pull images directly from an image repository and use them as edge applications.
Stream analytics
- IoT requires high-frequency data collection. Although the volume of data is large, the changes between data points are small, which reduces the value of the raw data. Stream analytics can clean, process, and aggregate the data before it is uploaded to the cloud. This significantly reduces data transmission costs.
- The connection between the edge and the cloud can be unstable. As a result, uploading data to the cloud cannot meet real-time computing requirements. Because stream analytics runs on the edge, it processes data with low latency and is not dependent on the network.
Message routing
IoT Edge provides a message routing feature. You can set message routing paths to control the flow of local data within edge computing nodes. This ensures that your data is secure and manageable.
The following routing paths are available:
- Device to IoT Hub
- Device to Function Compute
- Device to Stream Analytics
- Function Compute to Function Compute
- Function Compute to IoT Hub
- Stream Analytics to IoT Hub
- Stream Analytics to Function Compute
- IoT Hub to Function Compute
Resumable transfer
Edge computing nodes provide a data restoration feature for use during network disconnections or instability. When you configure message routing, you can set the Quality of Service (QoS). This allows device data to be saved to local storage during a network outage. After the network is restored, the cached data is synchronized to the cloud.