Functionality

General aspects

• Ready-to-use cloud offering
  • Bosch IoT Things is part of pre-configured packages with connections between all its microservices.
  • Can also be booked stand-alone
• Fully managed, shared cloud service
  • Various service plans: free (for evaluation), starter and standard
  • Pay-as-you-grow price model
  • Online calculator to estimate the consumption for your scenario
• High availability & reliability
  • Always-on (availability 99,5%)
  • High resilience of the system
• Scalability
  • Growth on demand
  • Quick response to increased data volume and transactions
• Open & flexible
  • Based on open source project: Eclipse Ditto.
  • Flexibility to integrate with 3rd-party applications and other infrastructures

Pre-integrated into use case packages

• Asset Communication package - for device connectivity and edge capabilities
• Device Management package - for software update and mass-management
• Integration with Bosch IoT Insights - for data management

The features in detail

Unified device API

• Your application can access the devices in a unified way,
  even
  • For different connectivity layers
  • For heterogeneous device types
• All north-bound and south-bound applications can address the digital twin of the device in the same way
• Bosch IoT Things supports a flexible abstraction meta-model, with re-usable elements for different device types
• Your applications can address devices in a user’s context, and thus respect his privacy demands

Integration

• Support for many out-of-the-box integration technologies to access our API in a seamless way,
  e.g. messaging technologies like AMQP, Apache Kafka, MQTT, WebSockets, Webhooks, REST API to interact with your devices
• You application can use managed connections to various endpoints
  (e.g. Bosch IoT Hub, Bosch IoT Insights, AMQP broker, MQTT broker, Azure Event Hub, AWS IoT MQTT, Apache Kafka).
• Additionally, any WebSocket connection can be opened ad-hoc
  (but is not stored at the solution, nor is it visible in your list of connections).
• Business application integration - for cloud-to-device communication
  • Easy to use REST-like HTTP API for access and interaction with data and functionality of things
  • Java client and JavaScript client to access all data and functionality of your things
  • Protocol based communication on twin and live channel
  • Live messages can be routed directly between applications and devices
  • Secured subscriptions on authorized information for applications via connections (integrations)
• Custom device connectivity integration - for device-to-cloud communication
  • Integration for devices is supported:
    • Your “direct” devices (IP ready) can be connected via Bosch IoT Hub or other device connectivity services
    • Your “indirect” devices (non-IP ready) can be connected via Bosch IoT Edge or other gateway technologies
• Integration options with public cloud ecosystems (AWS + Azure)
  (e.g. you could use an Azure Event Hub to forward data to your machine learning services)

Digital twin

• The Things service provides a digital representation of your device as a digital twin,
  allowing you to optionally store data in the twin for state management, e.g.
  • Sensor reading or other data reported by the device
  • Desired state e.g. incoming configuration updates from the business application
  • Additional information (meta data) for describing and managing devices
• Flexible search and RQL filter support
  • Twin info - all fields, e.g. ID, attributes, features with reported or desired property values
  • Meta info like creation date, latest updated etc.
  • Customizable search index
• Straight-forward life-cycle of things - Creation - device provisioning - Updates based on telemetry data and events from the device (device-to-cloud) - Updates based on remote messages from business applications (cloud-to-device) - Deletion - de-provisioning from the system

Security and privacy

• Advanced policy-based access control of every interaction with device data or functionality
• The policy document describes very fine-gained who can do what on each element (resource) of the device
• Control read and write access as well permissions to send or receive messages
• Authentication is based on OAuth2
  • User authentication for users with a JWT issued by
    • The Bosch IoT Suite - Suite Auth service
    • A Bosch ID account
    • A Google account
    • Your custom registered OAuth2 authorization provider
      (supported for all OpenID Connect compliant providers)
  • Client authentication with a JWT issued by
    • The Bosch IoT Suite - Suite Auth service
    • Your custom registered OAuth2 authorization provider
      (supported for all OpenID Connect compliant providers)
• Possibility to describe fine-grained permissions, in case your application needs notifications for specific changes

Payload mapping, enrichment, filtering

• Option for payload mapping - in case your endpoint expects another type of data (how the payload is organized
• Option to enrich and/or filter the events which are forwarded to authorized subjects
• Our service can adjust data/messages on-the-fly, before applying them to twins or delivery to the next layer (e.g. applications or devices)
• Same filtering options (RQL) as for search applicable

Toolkit for development

• Eclipse Ditto tooling (open source)
  is the open-source base for the commercial Things service, providing for example:
  • Things model
  • Things protocol
  • Java Client and JavaScript client
  • All concepts (Bosch IoT Things offers additionally the Solution management)
• Interactive API docs for HTTP API (OpenAPI 3)
• Compatible with concepts of Eclipse Vorto - open source project
• Dashboard, to
  • Browse all IoT assets
  • Manage your namespaces
  • Manage your connections
  • Keep track on quota limits, etc.
• Additionally, for the Bosch IoT Suite packages
  • Device Provisioning API
  • Developer Console
  • Bosch IoT Edge Services SDK