IoT Edge Compute Part 2 – Gluing together your IoT w/ Resin.io

In my previous blog post, I spoke to you about the need for compute at the IoT Edge and how Cisco provides two platforms (Cisco IOx and Cisco Kinetic) to help facilitate your Ops and App dev portions of your IoT engineering and development.  I also spoke to you about the importance of IoT gateways and their need in your IoT infrastructure.  If you want to hear more about that, please read my first blog post on the subject.

That being said, if your IoT solution only involves an IoT gateway, or you are using a Cisco IoT gateway as the main data acquisition device for your IoT solution, then Cisco IOx or Cisco Kinetic will be all you need.  However, for most of us deploying solutions, IoT gateways are just that – a gateway to our IoT network where multiple devices and applications live on that network beyond the gateway itself.  So if I want a solution where I can deploy and manage my applications on small IoT devices easily where can I get that done?

Device Glue with Resin.io

Resin.io is a unique but pretty awesome service that cloud manages your application, the life cycle of that application, and your device all at the same time (sound familiar, ahem… IOx / Kinetic).  Resin IO provides full cloud management of your device and on a large array of development boards (https://docs.resin.io/hardware/devices/) to get you started with your IoT solution.  It also provides tools to auto-provision IoT devices and connects them directly to your resin.io account.  If this sounds a lot like IOx or even Kinetic, then you would be right.  However, they focus at the device level of your IoT operations and Cisco Kinetic and Cisco IOx focus on your IoT gateway level.

This helps Ops teams manage devices and apps quickly.  Like Cisco IOx, Resin utilizes the power of Docker containers to help standardize the development process for your app developers to be in line with cloud-native app development.  Using Docker as the base of the application also allows development teams to write their application in code languages that are familiar to them – further reducing development costs. Resin allows you to have terminal access to your application directly from the Web UI.  Resin creates deployment pipelines to build and deploy your apps directly to your device.  Resin provides RESTful APIs to help with deployment and management of apps and devices.  This further reduces complexity and time resources for your Ops teams.

Cisco and Resin.io Together Makes Sense

Cisco Kinetic and IOx are great platforms to deploy apps and also provide a secure layer to your IoT networks and gateways but don’t support small device level deployments and applications.  Resin provides a great platform for deploying and provisioning smaller devices and deploying apps to those devices but lacks the provisioning and control of a secure network and gateway layers.  However, if you combine the Cisco Kinetic or IOx with Resin, the combined solution provides a synergistic solution for IoT that allows management of the full stack of IoT, from the network gateway and associated apps all the way down to the device level of your IoT solution.

The strength of Resin and Cisco IoT Gateways and IoT platforms (Kinetic and IOx) just makes sense.  You can better reduce your costs and have better insight into your IoT operations and all of the while making the lives of your Ops engineers and App developers simpler.

My Use of Resin w/ Cisco IOx and Kinetic

At a few Cisco Live events and other various trade shows, where I had an IoT demo,  I utilized Cisco IOx or Kinetic for my IoT Gateway device and applications and then Resin for my IoT device.  Those gateways and devices worked successfully without a hitch.  I was even able to re-deploy my application to those gateways and devices, live, when I realized I needed to make code improvements to my app.

What’s Next and How Do I Get Started???

In the coming weeks, I am going to publish some guides in this blog post series that will get you up and running on your Cisco IoT Gateways and your IoT devices.  So stay tuned and we will take your app and device development and deployments to the next level.

Your best place for using these solutions starts with DevNet. For access to DevNet and all developer resources can signup for DevNet here: https://developer.cisco.com/join/devnet or use this QR code.

For additional learning about and using Cisco IOx you can visit the Cisco IOx website  and docs website.   Then when you are ready for development and testing, you can start with the DevNet sandbox and reserve a virtual environment for IOx

For additional learning about using Cisco Kinetic you can visit the Cisco Kinetic website and docs site.

For additional learning and using Resin.IO check out their main site and docs website for utilizing their services and provisioning devices.