Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud Computing

IoT @ ORMAT

Connected world

Gone are the days, when just the PC & Laptops were on internet. Today we see more internet traffic from devices such as Mobile phones and Tablets. In fact the demand for connected everything is need of the hour. From the day one could connect to internet on mobile, the urge to monitor the home, office, operations & in general everything is ever increasing.

The realization of the need also is rapidly being supported with the introduction of technologies such as cloud computing, standard protocols, internet enabled intelligent devices, connection friendly sensors. And thus is the growth of required infrastructure such as broad coverage of Mobile networks, affordable mobile network tariffs and high bandwidth internet using 3G & LTE.

Strong felt need

The need of ?Internet of Things? is felt in many sectors & most importantly in the following sectors:

  • Environmental Monitoring
  • Infrastructure Management
  • Industrial Applications
  • Energy Management
  • Medical and Healthcare Systems
  • Building and Home Automation
  • Transport Systems

Thinking of scale

Due to the ubiquitous nature of connected objects in the IoT, an unprecedented number of devices are expected to be connected to the Internet. It is, as such, clear that the IoT will consist of a very large number of devices being connected to the Internet.

Since the number of connected devices is going to be very high, the IoT applications must be built with scalability, security & reliability as key characteristics. This leads to the adoption of reliable web application frameworks & scalable data stores in the Cloud. Cloud offers resources on demand and thus strikes off the limit on number of connected devices and its users. That makes it a best choice for IoT applications.

There are various cloud infrastructures available in the world today from many service providers such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc. And there are various cloud application frameworks being offered, such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Azure to name a few. Thus, the IoT application developers are provided with lot of choices to make depending on their team expertise and application demands.

We at ORMAT chose to develop our solutions on Cloud from day one. After evaluating suitability of various frameworks & cloud services, we have built our FleetOR application on Google Cloud Platform.