Open Source IoT Platform

based on OpenStack and

Kubernetes
Jim Phillips - May 12, 2016

Our blog post explains open source IoT platform introduced at OpenStack
Summit Keynote at Austin in more detail. First we explain our approach and
vision to IoT, technical overview and show two sample use cases. Learn Containers 5
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Internet of Things (IoT) is “the next big thing” in cloud computing era. Leading Platforms

industry vendors present their solution for IoT and interpret them to t their READ IT NOW

business strategy. For this reason IoT is abused as a new buzzword for vendor
proprietary business solutions. Term IoT can mean almost everything and it MIRANTIS WEBSTORE
even less speci c than cloud computing services. The Internet of Things Purchase Kubernetes support
revolves around increased machine-to-machine communication, it is built on SHOP NOW
networks of data-gathering sensors and actuators connected to cloud
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computing services that process all the information. It is going to make

everything in our lives from streetlights to seaports “smart.”


At tcp cloud we look at IoT in different way than other vendors. In same way we
deliver private cloud solutions to our customer, using existing open source
projects and extending our cloud service approach to create universal IoT
platform, that can handle multiple use cases. We have de ned following
requirements:
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 No vendor lock-in on both software and hardware side. IoT gateway CPU must
have either x86/64 or ARM architecture. We do not want to be locked to any
vendor with expensive proprietary appliances.

Interoperable
IoT platform must be universal and usable for multiple use cases. For instance
IoT gateways can be used in the street lamps for counting objects the same way
as in the smart factory or industry 4.0 application.

Therefore we designed following high level architecture, which uses open

source projects OpenStack, Kubernetes, OpenContrail and Docker.

Sensors
Any arbitrary sensor for reading environmental data (temperature, humidity,
CO2 level), object counts, etc.

IQRF Network
IQRF is a robust wireless mesh technology operating on sub-gigahertz ISM
bands. Easily integrated with sensors.

Gateways
Data from sensors is processed by IQRF coordinator in IoT gateways. These
can be any x86/64 or ARM architecture, which run systems from prebuild
images based on Debian with Docker, Kubernetes and OpenContrail vRouter.

Internet
Gateways are connected through any arbitrary Internet connection
(GSM/LTE/WiFi), because SDN creates dynamically L3VPNs between Docker
services and data center.

Datacenter
Datacenter contains OpenStack cloud and Kubernetes control plane. Both
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these orchestration solutions used OpenContrail as single SDN (Software

De ne Networking). This enable to manage whole platform from central point.
We can remotely start any Docker container on location and create dynamical


connection to services in OpenStack. OpenStack cloud contains data stores
and big data processing services.

Vizualizations / API Access

All data is visualized in web portal and accessible through REST API service.

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More technical details are covered in section Technology Overview. Let’s have
This website uses cookies and similar
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Smart City Prototype
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use case andis SmartCity project of a small city Pisek located in Czech
your rights, see our Cookie Policy and
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endpoints and approximately 300 IoT gateways that run in high-vailability
 mode in Kubernetes driven containers. Part of the solution is an open data
portal and data API available for third party companies that provides
information about:

Traf c ow, routing, parking

Monitoring, management, energy saving
E-commerce, marketing, tourist infromation
Environmental analysis
Lifestyle, social services, social networks

Target solution uses IoT gateways based on RaspberryPi 2 serving as IoT

gateways. Data from gateways is stored in Graphite and processed by custom
datamining applications and results are displayed in City citizens portal based
on Leonardo CMS, which is web service allowing mixing complex visualizations
with arbitrary content. This Open Data portal enables data access through
dashboard visualizations or API.

The following screen shows sample output from crossroad Kollarova x Zizkova
with Vehicle and Pedestrian passages for speci c period.

You can read more about this project in “A step forward in making cities
smarter” at SuperUser Magazine from Austin or following presentation from
KubeCon 2016.

Smart Conference at OpenStack Summit Austin

To proof that our IoT platform is really independent on application

environment, we took one IoT gateway (RaspberryPi 2) from the city project
and put into Austin Convention Center during OpenStack Summit together
with IQRF based mesh network connecting sensors that measure humidity,
temperature and CO2 levels. This demonstrates ability that IoT gateway can
manage or collect data from any technology like IQRF, Bluetooth, GPIO, and
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any other communication standard supported on Linux based platforms.

We deployed 20 sensors and 20 routers on 3 conference oors with a single 


active IoT gateway receiving data from entire IQRF mesh network and relaying
it to dedicated time-series database, in this case Graphite. Collector is MQQT-
Java bridge running inside docker container managed by Kubernetes. The most
interesting is distance between docker container on Raspberry in conference
and virtual machine running in Europe data center. Dynamic network overlay
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 The following picture shows single wireless IQRF mesh network during sensors
and routers discovery. Zones 0 - 1 cover conference oor 1 and 2 - 4 oor 4.

IQRF is a wireless mesh technology operating on sub-gigahertz ISM bands. It

provides very easy integration, product interoperability, robust mesh
networking with maximum of 240 hops, range of hundreds of meters and ultra-
low power operation.

The following screenshot shows real time CO2 values from different rooms on
2 oors. Historical graph shows values from Monday. You can easily recognize
when the main keynote session started and when was the lunch period.

For Austin data collecting, following schema covers services

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 This part further explains our technical concept for IoT platform. The IoT
platform was created with general vision, which is to collect, manage and
process data from thousands of endpoints securely and dynamically with
centralized management.

Therefore architecture is divided into two main parts:

Datacenter

Datacenter is central point for management of entire IoT platform. There

OpenStack IaaS cloud with virtual machines is running along cloud and SDN
control planes. These machines contain time-series storages, data processing
clusters, data API proxy access, visualization web services, etc.

Gateway

IoT Gateways are located at any target place like street lamps, factory
machines, home appliances, etc. SDN provides transport layer connecting
remote IoT gateways with cloud services. Gateways can be multiplatform, it is
possible to mix x86/64 and ARM devices today. It is possible to host multiple
sensor platforms for multiple customers on single gateway because of micro
services segmentation (Docker containers) and Kubernetes multi-tenancy
support. The platform is able to provide scalable multi-tenant space where
applications and sensors are on same network regardless the distance.

The following schema shows datacenter layers and components on gateway

side. The section Detail schema shows deeper information.

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Detail Schema

Detail
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 for multi-tenancy and security between different sensors. OpenContrail is
used to connect both sides and provide network segmentation between
Kubernetes PODs and OpenStack Project VMs.

As already mentioned segmentation is done by SDN overlays. The important is

only IP connectivity between datacenter edge router and IoT gateway. Lowest
layer is VPN between gateway gateway OS and Edge Router in DC. Next layer
is SDN, where OpenContrail enables direct communication between VM
(OpenStack Cloud) and Container(Gateway). This approach allows to choose
from variety of sensors and actuators, privilege them and securely connect
with processing applications inside of cloud.

Datacenter contains following services:

Management Services
HW cluster running VMs with all control services: OpenStack controller,
OpenContrail controller (SDN), Kubernetes master, Salt Master.

OpenStack Cloud
OpenStack projects provides segmentation for different virtual machine
services like databases (graphite, in uxdb, openTSDB), big data processing
(Hadoop) and data visualization (Grafana, LeonardoCMS). It runs on KVM
hypervisors and uses OpenContrail neutron plugin for networking.

Edge Routers
OpenContrail creates iBGP peering with datacenter Edge routers, where
propagates dynamically network routes from both OpenStack VMs and
Kubernetes pods on IoT gateways. It creates standard L3VPN as
MPLSoverGRE or MPLSoverUDP.

Remote gateways contain components:

Kubernetes Minion
Kubernetes minion communicates with Kubernetes master in datacenter and
manages PODs by kubelet. Kubelet uses opencontrail plugin, which connects
docker containers with vRouter agent.

Kubernetes PODs
Kubernetes PODs are single or multiple docker containers connected to
vRouter. PODs are segmented by labels. This enable to start different
application, which can read from different message bus as IQRF, Bluetooth or
GPIO.
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 Application View

The following schema provides explanation of application view. This shows that
VMs inside of OpenStack cloud can reach Docker container in any geographic
location in L2 or L3 private network thanks to OpenContrail overlay. Therefore
application developers can use same tool as they uses in standard cloud. They
can deploy VM application controller by HEAT and then Kubernetes services in
containers on remote gateways by simple yaml les.

For instance we gather data from environmental sensors. Sensor is directly

connected to container where data is processed in Docker container and send
them to Graphite time series database. Because we want to present data
graphically and realtime we use another VM with Leonardo CMS which reads
from Graphite APIs and displays data on website. Accordingly to this we can
create different projects on same principles in same cloud with multiple inputs
and outputs.

Conclusion

We tried to brie y explain our vision and prototype deployments of tcp cloud
IoT platform. Currently we are working on detail design for whole Smart City
solution.

We got a great response from community after having life showcases at

OpenStack Summit in Austin and KubeCon in London this year. Our concept
seems to be accepted as a possible way of dealing with security, resiliance and
performance concerns of IoT platforms and lot of technology partners want to
join us in our effort and extend our IoT platform to their solution. We are now
starting on concept Industry 4.0 to create rst Smart Factory based on open
source projects.

If you want to see IoT in action, you can register for OpenStack Day Prague
where we show again live presentation with our industry partners.

If you are interested in any kind of cooperation let us know or follow us on

twitter and check blogs.

Sources

About Cookies onBuilding this Site.a SmartCity with IoT - keynote from OpenStack Summit Austin
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 Creating a smart conference with OpenStack and containers -
http://superuser.openstack.org/articles/creating-a-smart-conference-
with-openstack-and-containers
Output from Austin conference - http://austin.tcpcloud.eu
Samples from Pisek cross streets - https://pisek.urbandata.cz
Slides from Keynote - http://www.slideshare.net/JakubPavlik1/building-
a-smartcity-with-iot-keynote-slides

cy

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