Comparison of Open Source IoT Integration Frameworks

2 minute read

Comparison of Open Source IoT Integration Frameworks such as Eclipse Kura (+ Apache Camel), Node-RED, Flogo, Apache Nifi, StreamSets, and others… (slide and video recording)

ByKai Waehner
3. November 2016

In November 2016, I attended Devoxx conference in Casablanca. Around 1500 developers participated. A great event with many awesome speakers and sessions. Hot topics this year besides Java: Open Source Frameworks, Microservices (of course!), Internet of Things (including IoT Integration), Blockchain, Serverless Architectures.

I had three talks:

How to Apply Machine Learning to Real Time Processing
Comparison of Open Source IoT Integration Frameworks
Tools in Action – Live Demo of Open Source Project Flogo

In addition, I was interviewed by the Voxxed team about Big Data, Machine Learning and Internet of Things. The video will be posted on Voxxed website in the next weeks.

You can find several slides and video recordings about my big data / machine learning topic on my blog / website. Therefore, I will focus on the open source IoT frameworks in this post.

Open Source Integration Frameworks for the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) and edge integration are getting more important than ever before due to the massively growing number of connected devices year by year. In this talk, I showed open source frameworks built to develop very lightweight microservices. These can be deployed on small devices or in cloud native containers / serverless architectures with very low resource consumption to wire together all different kinds of hardware devices, APIs and online services.

The focus of this session was to discuss open source process engines such as Eclipse Kura (in conjunction with Apache Camel), Node-RED or Flogo. These offer a framework plus zero-code environment with Web IDE for building and deploying IoT integration and data processing directly onto IoT gateways and connected devices. For that, they leverage IoT standards such as MQTT, WebSockets or CoaP, but also other interfaces such as Twitter feeds or REST services.

The session also discussed the relation to other components in a IoT architecture including:

Open source dataflow pipelines (like Apache NiFi / MiNiFy, StreamSets or Cask Hydrator),
Open source stream processing frameworks (such as Apache Storm, Flink, Spark Streaming or Samza)
Cloud IoT platforms (such as AWS IoT, Cloud IoT Cloud Platform or IBM’s open source serverless framework OpenWhisk).