Introduction

What is Clearblade?

ClearBlade™ is the enterprise Internet of Things platform to rapidly engineer and run real-time, scalable Industrial IoT applications. Learn how to create and deploy your IoT solutions on the ClearBlade platform. Ingesting information from any device, processing data at the edge or in the cloud, rendering powerful visualization and updating your back office applications in realtime. You can also learn how to build Enterprise IoT applications that are secure by default, perform blazingly fast, scale across millions of devices and meet the needs of your business.

Features

  • Edge Computing: ClearBlade’s Edge allows users to process, analyze and perform actions on the data.
  • Vertically and Horizontally Scalable: The ClearBlade Code Engine(Node) scales Vertically by increasing computational power (CPU & Memory) of Nodes and horizontally by running cluster of Nodes in parallel.
  • Offline Computing: The ClearBlade Edge functions (Authentication, Data Processing, Analysis & Performs Actions) in real-time even with offline connection.
  • Inherently Secure: The platform has role-based authorization and user tokens.
  • Cloud Agnostic: The platform can be integrated with any Cloud vendor.
  • Hardware Agnostic: The platform can interact with any hardware.
  • Protocol Agnostic: The platform can interact with devices using any industry standard protocol.
  • Flexible Deployments: The Edge can be deployed onto any gateway device running Linux.
  • Parallel Processing: ClearBlade balances load across multiple Nodes & each Node allows user to configure processing of load using parallel services.
  • Customization of Business and Logic: ClearBlade empowers development of solutions that are customizable based on developer’s requirement.
  • High Extensibility: IoT Package Modules are available to provide reusable assets to add to your solutions.
  • High Interoperability: ClearBlade interoperates using adapters, webhooks, Database Connectors, Northbound Service Integrations, and API integrations.
  • Low Memory Footprint: The full power of the Platform on small IoT gateways can be experienced with memory footprint as low as ~30mb through Edge Platform.
  • Developer Focused: ClearBlade fosters quicker development through its Web Console and Commandline tools.
  • Real-time Connectivity: Data can be visualized and analyzed from any device/sensor in real-time.

What is the Edge?

ClearBlade Edge Platform is an application to synchronize, configure, manage, and deploy IoT systems. It is designed to perform well on a constrained hardware platform and be managed and updated remotely post-deployment.

For more information about the Edge, click here.

Edge Capabilities

  • Security
    • Encryption
    • Authentication
      > Including tokens and certificates
    • Authorization
  • Synchronization & State Management- User and device states synchronized with IoT systems as devices go on and offline.
  • Offline Continuity- 100% uptime and realtime processing, analytics and actions, even when the connection is offline.
  • Integration Capabilities
    • Connectivity via MQTT & HTTP(s).
    • Pre-built Adapters for BLE, ZigBee, Lora, and others.
  • Data filtering and Streaming- Store, modify, analyze, manage and route data at the edge.
  • Business rules and events- Implement business rules, trigger and react to events, and analyze results via business logic locally at the edge.
  • Messaging- Scalable, secure brokering of messages between devices and users at the edge.
  • Flexible deployment options- Can be deployed onto any gateway device.

Lifecycle

Startup

When a ClearBlade EDGE is started, the following occurs:

  • Edge updates the ClearBlade Platform with connection details and other metadata
  • Edge requests its latest schema information from the ClearBlade platform for all the assets
  • Edge opens a dedicated connection to the ClearBlade platform
  • Keeps the desired assets synchronized.

Synchronization

Synchronization occurs between the platform and the edge in multiple forms. - Deploy: Deploy is a unidirectional flow of changes from the platform to the (selected) edges. Any changes made to any platform asset is deployed to the edge (depending on EDGE configuration). - Sync: Sync is a bi-directional flow of changes to & from the platform and the edge. Any asset changes made on the platform or any edge are sync’d.

Synchronization - Confliction Resolution

The EDGE synchronization process allows data collections to be synchronized between the ClearBlade Platform and edge gateways. What does the sync process do when there are collection schema conflicts?

System Schemas:

  • EDGE will always default to the ClearBlade Platform versions of the User and Device schemas
  • User and Device records will be reconciled according to their last modified dates

Other Schemas:

  • Depends on EDGE configuration
    • Platform Wins
    • Edge Wins
    • User Defined

What makes ClearBlade EDGE different from ClearBlade Platform?

Edge can:

  • Typically, contain a defined subset of system assets that have been defined to the ClearBlade Platform.
  • Reuse assets defined in the ClearBlade Platform or it can define its own assets.
  • Run “offline”.
  • Be executed in a cache-only mode: no assets are persisted across restarts.
  • Be executed in “lean” mode
    • Analytics are not stored
    • Logs are not persited
    • Ideal for long-running instances
    • Ideal for low-memory devices

Terminology

  • Platform- the central system in a ClearBlade IoT solution and the controller/broker of system communications.

  • Console- the web interface developers will use to access and create/configure assets in the platform.

  • System- first item created in the platform to represent a backend for the web dashboard that needs a common system of record.

  • Edge- an application to synchronize, configure, manage, and deploy IoT systems.

The complete list of ClearBlade terminology can be found in the Glossary.

What makes the ClearBlade Platform “inherently secure” ?

For more information about Security, click here.

  • Data Encryption- All public API data (made available through SDKs) is designed to run over SSL.
  • Platform Administration- Allows developers to specify role based authorization.

  • Platform Authorization

    • User Registry
    • Anonymous Authentication
    • Both require a user token

Quick Start Demo

ClearBlade make demos available for their users to gain hands-on experience on building solutions & customizing existing solutions for your own use case. Here are a few demos to get you started:

Build an IoT Smart Monitoring Solution (15 minutes)

There are more demos available on IPM