Rich, real-time interaction with remote devices

While recording the last demo, I had an insight:

SIOT is for people who want rich, real-time interaction with remote devices.

While we have a path to fairly low data usage, this is not the first priority. The first priority is that when we see data in the portal, we know it is current. When we turn on a pump remotely, it turns on instantly. When a condition happens that causes a rule to activate, it happens immediately, not minutes later when the system gets around to running that rule. These priorities drive the design and architecture of SIOT. I’ve spent too much time with consumer IoT technologies watching spinners spin for tens of seconds while waiting for my garage door to close, only to be told “something went wrong.” SIOT is something different, designed for industrial reliability and responsiveness. In that demo, a button press on a Raspberry Pi travels to the cloud server, through a rule, and back to an LED in about 100 ms.

This focus requires some tradeoffs. You probably can’t get this responsiveness using lambda functions in a hyperscale serverless cloud system. You can’t easily scale it to a bazillion devices, or implement it with a 2 MB/month device bandwidth budget. But the goal we are working toward is to support thousands of devices and hundreds of users in real time with a relatively modest cloud server running SIOT.

This is the vision. It’s not for everyone or everything, but if you want a great user experience for a connected industrial product, SIOT may be the technology for you.