Our CEO Pilgrim was interviewed by Josh Taubenheim of MachNation about how IoT vendors can scale while ensuring high reliability. Topics they discussed include:
- Challenges of scaling IoT - from Building to Running
- Does it work (and if not, why not?). Lots of ways things can go wrong.
- DevicePilot - a SaaS tool for service monitoring and management
- Why it's important - devices are there to deliver a service
- IoT these days is less about whizzy bells & whistles, more about the life-cycle of a device
- Do IoT tools and organisational requirements change with scale?
- "Manual" approach has merits initially, but wheels will fall off as you scale if you stay manual
- Testing IoT frameworks at scale
- Ongoing monitoring essential
- KPIs - internal, informal metrics over time for what is good-enough - often start quite technical e.g. "uptime".
- At greater scale, consolidated channel-partner customers will enforce harder SLAs. Need to manage to them.
- Quality does cost money, are you aiming for "two nines"?
- Need to move beyond purely technical metrics to business metrics - e.g. from uptime to site availability
- Tech metrics are "necessary but not sufficient"
- Performance testing - continuous monitoring or "point a million devices at an endpoint and see what happens"
- Simulated device estates for testing
- Have to plan ahead - can't have confidence your architecture will scale until you test it (with synthetic devices). Maybe 10x today's load.
- Future of performance testing, how will tools evolve?
- IoT has so many moving parts, so many industries & vendors. Compared with telco, servers, web it's been slow, because they were so much more homogenous.
- Starting to see standard parts of the stack, what are they called, how do they fit together, who makes them.
- Establishing category names makes it easier for customers to find vendors and vice versa
Listen to Pilgrim (Episode 6) alongside other interviewees, from companies including PTC, Waylay, Losant and Software AG in the MachNation Tempest podcast library.
