Performance Characterization of the servIoTicy API: an IoT-as-a-Service Data Management Platform

In the last years, Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data platforms are clearly converging in terms of technologies, problems and approaches. IoT workloads generate a vast amount of data that needs to be stored and processed, becoming a Big Data problem. IoT devices and sensors generate streams of data across a diversity of locations and protocols that in the end reach a central platform that is used to store and process these streams. Processing can be done in real time, with transformations and enrichment happening on-the-fly, but it can also happen after data is stored and organized in repositories. In the former case, stream processing technologies are required to operate on the data; in the latter analytics and queries are of common use. This paper presents a detailed characterization of the servIoTicy platform: a state-of-the-art infrastructure for hosting Internet of Things (IoT) workloads in the Cloud. It provides multi-tenant data stream processing capabilities, a REST API, data analytics, advanced queries and multi-protocol support in a combination of advanced data-centric technologies. The deployment of such a complex platform in the cloud requires a detailed understanding of all these components and tiers to allow for auto-scaling and dynamic provisioning capabilities. This paper aims to provide this initial characterization to be the basis for advanced cloud provisioning strategies and algorithms.