Architecture | ClearBlade Documentation

ClearBlade IoT Enterprise is a development and runtime environment to run IoT applications efficient and at scale.

Purpose

ClearBlade IoT Enterprise operates as:

IoT application stack execution environment
Development environment
Edge orchestration platform

IoT Enterprise functional capabilities

ClearBlade IoT Enterprise operates as a full stack, middleware, or backend to an IoT application with its six core modules:

Module	Features
Code Engine	JavaScript engine designed for highly parallelized microservices
Collections	A generic API for interacting with data stores, such as ClearBlade Cloud, MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL
Portals	A fully customizable user dashboard for interacting with your IoT application
Deployment	A highly customizable configuration for pushing microservices, data, sync behavior, and portals to edge groups
	A scalable, lightweight MQTT broker for interacting with IoT devices
Adapters	A robust model for deploying software and hardware adapters to many new or existing edges

API/Broker and IoT Enterprise/Edge integration

Development environment

Deploying an IoT solution once is simple, but a production solution will require many development iterations, new features, and security updates. ClearBlade IoT Enterprise operates as a development environment, allowing developers to modify micro-services, collections, portals, and other assets within the centralized platform. The changes are synced across all edges. This creates a simple, centralized development experience that can seamlessly sync across many edges running on different machines in many geospatially distant networks.

Edge orchestration

The Edge orchestration feature allows a single platform to

Administrate deployment to configure which microservices, collections, portals, and assets are deployed to edges and synced
Start, stop, pause, deploy, and undeploy adapters to edge groups
Monitor real-time system edge resource usage to evaluate appropriate hardware needs

Multi-tenanted model

Developers can use a single ClearBlade IoT Enterprise instance at once. Each developer can run many IoT applications simultaneously, and systems can be shared between developers. Each IoT application, called a system, includes the six above modules and runs completely isolated from every other platform system.

Scaling

ClearBlade IoT Enterprise is comprised of cluster nodes. Each node contains a certain number of vCPUs. Additional nodes provide additional vCPU and memory capacity to support devices. For some solutions, the following estimates can be made using nodes with eight vCPUs.

Number of devices	Cluster nodes required	Storage (GB) required per month
1,000	1	1.5
10,000	1	15
25,000	2	37
100,000	6	146
250,000	14	364
500,000	28	728
1,000,000	56	1,456
10,000,000	556	14,551

ClearBlade

Name	Value	Details
Platform messages process rate	300	Per ClearBlade node per second
Devices supported per ClearBlade node	200,000	= msg_proc_per_node_per_sec / (msg_per_hour / 3600), = 30 / (6 / 3600)

IoT

Name	Value	Details
Device message size	349 bytes	MQTT publish, packet size. See appendix
Device hourly message rate	6	Per hour, ClearBlade best practice: Interval > 10 minutes
Device data generated	1.49 megabytes	Per device per month = 349 * 6 * 24 * 31 / 1024 / 1024

Number of devices	Cluster nodes required	Storage (GB) required per month
1,000	1	1.5
10,000	1	15
25,000	2	37
100,000	6	146
250,000	14	364
500,000	28	728
1,000,000	56	1,456
10,000,000	556	14,551

Appendix

Average MQTT publish message size

Topic:

**_monitor/_asset/D4-53-83-A0-AF-F9/location**

Contents:

{
      "name": "pump",
      "id": "214wsafd21-42112-1dfdsfsd-243-ddff",
      "amps": 244,
      "description": "some description",
      "enabled": true,
      "last_update": "2019-09-04T17:57:16.875586669Z",
      "location": { "latitude": 12.132233, "longitude": 123.1234 }
    }

Packet component	Size (bytes)
Topic	42
Payload	298
Control, length, and meta	9
Total	349 bytes