[OpenTRV-dev] FYI: Eclipse Kapua

[Damon Hart-Davis]

https://projects.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-kapua

Background: 
The Eclipse Kapua project is proposed as an open source incubator project under the Eclipse IoT Project.

This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. Please send all feedback to the Eclipse Proposals Forum.

With analysts predicting millions of connected devices, there is a growing need for solutions which manage edge devices and integrate them with the enterprise IT infrastructure. This need is even more evident in the convergence between Operation Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT). OT supports physical value creation and manufacturing processes that comprises the devices, sensors and software necessary to control and monitor plant, equipment and, in general, company assets or products. Information Technology (IT), on the other hand, combines all necessary technologies for information processing.

Internet of Things solutions creates an integration bridge between OT and IT by connecting company’s products and by integrating processes. Internet of Things solutions provide generic integration platforms between the complex and fragmented world of the IoT devices and the enterprise IT infrastructure.

Scope: 
Eclipse Kapua is a modular integration platform for IoT devices and smart sensors that aims at bridging Operation Technology with Information Technology. Eclipse Kapua focuses on providing comprehensive management of edge IoT nodes including their connectivity, configuration, and application life cycle. Aggregated real-time data streams from the edge can be archived for historical analysis or flexibly routed towards enterprise IT systems and applications. Finally, Eclipse Kapua provides a web-based administration console and is accessible through RESTful API for easy application integration.

The goal of the Eclipse Kapua project is to provide an IoT integration platform with the following high-level requirements:

	• The platform manages the connectivity for IoT devices and IoT gateways through a different set of protocols. Initial support will be offered to established IoT protocols like MQTT. Other protocols like AMQP, HTTP, and CoAP will be added over time. The connectivity layer is also responsible for managing device authentication and authorization.
	• The platform manages the devices on the edge. Device management offers the ability to introspect device configuration, update device applications and firmware, and control the device remotely. The IoT platform exposes an open contract towards the target device being managed with no assumption on the device software stack. The device management should evolve to adopt emerging standard device management protocols like LWM2M.
	• IoT devices can collect large amounts of telemetry data. The IoT platform enables data pipelines on such data. The data pipelines can offer: data archival for dashboards or business intelligence applications, enable real-time analytics and business rules. A valuable requirement is flexible and configurable data integration routes, offering data storage options to collect the incoming data and make it available to upstream enterprise applications.
	• The IoT platform relies on solid foundations. In particular, it provides multi-tenant account management, user management, permissions and roles.
	• The IoT platform is fully programmable via RESTful web services API. A web-based administration console for a device operator is desirable.
	• The IoT platform can be deployed either in the Cloud or ‘on premise’. Its packaging should  allow for flexible deployment options.