Unlike traditional enterprise IT environments where the data center is at the core of almost every function, IT deployments involving the Internet of Things (IoT) are going to push processing out to edge of the network as much as possible in order to reduce the amount of data that has to transverse the network.
To facilitate more processing at the edge of the IoT network, TIBCO Software this week released Project Flogo, an open source integration engine that is order of magnitudes smaller than any run time engine written in Java or Node.js.
TIBCO Software CTO Matt Quinn says Project Flogo, written in the Go programming language, is an effort to help jumpstart IoT deployments by making it easier to integrate data flows at the IoT gateway rather than having to send constant streams of data back to a data center.
“We’ve built a super lightweight broker for the edge,” says Quinn.
Project Flogo won’t replace every class of integration broker. Instead, Quinn says, IT organizations will see more integration diversity as different types of integration brokers get optimized for different classes of workloads. TIBCO Software will then provide the management and orchestration framework to integrate those integration engines across the enterprise.
TIBCO Software, adds Quinn, opted to make Project Flogo available as open source code to make it easier on developers to create IoT applications that, in turn, will fuel the “diaspora” of integration out to the edge of the network.
Obviously, most organizations are just now starting to really understand what goes into deploying and supporting IoT applications. But the one thing that is becoming clear is that many of the traditional assumptions concerning how traditional enterprise application workloads are deployed in the data center will not apply.