Introduction

What is ClearBlade?

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

Features

• Edge computing: ClearBlade Edge allows users to process, analyze, and perform actions on data.

• Vertically and horizontally scalable: The ClearBlade Code Engine scales vertically by increasing the computational power of nodes by running a cluster of nodes in parallel.

• Offline computing: The ClearBlade Edge functions (authentication, data processing, analysis, and actions) are in real time, even with an 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 loads across multiple nodes — each node allows users to configure load processing using parallel services.

• Business and logic customization: ClearBlade empowers customizable solution development based on developers' requirements.

• High extensibility: IoT Package Modules 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 a memory footprint as low as ~30 MB through the Edge Platform.

• Developer-focused: ClearBlade fosters quick development through its web console and command line tools.

• Real-time connectivity: Data can be visualized and analyzed from any device/sensor in real time.

What is the Edge?

The 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.

Edge capabilities

• Security

  • Encryption

  • Authentication
    > Including tokens and certificates

  • Authorization

• Synchronization and state management: User and device states are synchronized with IoT systems as devices go on and offline.

• Offline continuity: 100% uptime, real-time processing, analytics, and actions, even when the connection is offline.

• Integration capabilities

  • MQTT & HTTP connectivity

  • 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 an edge starts, this occurs:

• The edge updates the ClearBlade Platform with connection details and other metadata.

• The edge requests its latest schema information from the ClearBlade Platform for all the assets.

• The edge opens a dedicated connection to the ClearBlade Platform.

• The edge keeps the desired assets synchronized.

Synchronization

Synchronization occurs between the Platform and edge in multiple forms.

Deploy: A unidirectional change flow from the Platform to the selected edges. Any Platform asset changes are deployed to the edge.

Sync: A bi-directional change flow to and from the Platform and edge. Any asset changes made on the Platform or edge are synced.

Synchronization: Confliction resolution

The edge synchronization process allows data collections to be synchronized between the ClearBlade Platform and edge gateways.

System schemas:

• The 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 the edge configuration

  • Platform wins

  • Edge wins

  • User-defined

What makes ClearBlade Edge different from the ClearBlade Platform?

ClearBlade Edge can:

• Contain a defined ClearBlade Platform system asset subset

• Reuse assets defined in the ClearBlade Platform, or define its 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 persisted

  • Ideal for long-running instances and 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, create, and configure Platform assets.

• System: The Platform’s first item created to represent the web dashboard’s backend that needs a common record system.

• 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?

• 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

For more security information, click here.