Planning a Scalable, Multi-Tenant SaaS IoT Platform

Summary

An IT consulting firm wanted to turn its time-consuming, one-off IoT infrastructure projects into a SaaS IoT platform that businesses could use to set up a consistent IoT infrastructure automatically. Lacking experience in such a large-scale initiative, the firm engaged INNERLUXES as a technical partner to design the platform's architecture. INNERLUXES delivered a scalable, multi-tenant, cloud-agnostic architecture documented in a Software Architecture Definition, along with an MVP development plan and a system requirements specification.

About the Client

The Client is a European IT consulting firm that develops network and infrastructure solutions and provides related maintenance services.

The Challenge

Initially, the Client designed custom IoT infrastructure solutions for various businesses, but this was time-consuming and limited the number of companies it could work with. To make better use of its resources and expand its reach, the Client decided to create an IoT platform delivered as SaaS that would enable businesses to set up a consistent IoT infrastructure automatically. As the company had no experience with such large-scale initiatives, it was looking for a technical partner to design the architecture of the future platform.

The Solution

INNERLUXES assembled a SaaS consulting team — a project manager, a business analyst, a solution architect, a DevOps engineer, a data engineer, and a Python developer — within two weeks. To assess the Client's needs, the business analyst conducted a series of in-depth interviews with the Client, while the Client interviewed possible end users of its IoT platform, such as representatives of innovative construction companies and plants, to understand the most-wanted use cases.

Using the elicited information, INNERLUXES mapped out the key technical requirements for the SaaS IoT platform:

• Independence from any provider-specific cloud services.
• Protection of the platform's core from user alteration, while still providing possibilities for easy maintenance.

To meet these requirements, INNERLUXES designed a multi-tenant platform architecture with the Client as the Super Admin, able to manage the access of all users. The multi-tenant architecture helped balance load between users' instances, isolate user data, and collect personalized statistics on resource utilization.

The team described the resulting architecture in a Software Architecture Definition (SAD) document, which contained the following parts:

• Component view (logical architecture components).
• Data flow.
• Infrastructure.

INNERLUXES supported the designed architecture with an MVP development plan and a system requirements specification for the platform.

The Results

• Based on the artifacts created by INNERLUXES, the platform would help end users connect their company's IoT-related data sources and target systems without any coding skills.
• End users would be able to spawn a full-fledged IoT platform in a short time.
• This would help the Client expand its market presence with the new offering while freeing up resources.

Methodologies

Q&A sessions, functional decomposition, business requirements analysis, competitor analysis, Software Architecture Definition (SAD).