Embedded Linux Conference & OpenIoT Summit North America 2018

Networks are unreliable: bandwidth can be scarce, latency can vary, connections can get throttled or even dropped. Connected things must be built to survive these conditions to reliably transmit and receive data.

As we built the Azure IoT SDKs, we learnt a lot about patterns to ensure reliable communications: retries, timeouts, keep-alives, hearbeats, QoS values, etc. At the application level, using message queues, message acknowledgement, desired/reported state APIs, synchronous request/response APIs...

This talk will go in depth on these topics and try to give an overview of what questions to ask when building a connected device, what tools device makers have and what trade-offs may be needed to ensure reliable communications between devices and the cloud.

Although some examples will rely on some Azure IoT features, this talk should be generic and applicable to any cloud platform.