Fog computing is made up of : “ Things ,” IP enabled devices that can store , sense , and analyze data ; and connectivity , a wide variety of technologies for connecting , communicating , securing , and translating packets of data in real time from the variety of “ Things .”
Global Infrastructure
The next set of technologies that make up the Internet of Things constitute its global infrastructure . Many IoT applications require multiple datacenters dispersed globally that must be able to scale on demand . Certainly some companies will use their internal datacenters to build IoT applications , but with data requirements surging into petabyte or exabyte numbers , it quickly becomes unfeasible to spend both human and compute capital to scale these applications in real time . IoT is a classic use case for cloud computing and the pay-as-you-go model .
The big three public cloud providers – AWS , Google , and Microsoft – are all launching robust IoT capabilities to simplify and accelerate the application development process for building IoT applications . Private and hybrid cloud solutions will also play hard in this space due to data locale rules in various countries . A growing number of stand-alone IoT platforms that can integrate with any major cloud provider have also emerged .
Big Data
Small data that is processed on devices in the “ fog ” tells you “ what ” is happening . Big data is data from those devices that is collected in real-time , near real-time , or batch , and brought into the virtual or physical datacenter . There , it is ingested , scrubbed , aggregated , and made available for analysis to understand the “ why ” questions . For example , the retailer who sent the offer to the person who came into the vicinity of the store , may perform a variety of analyses to determine what that person ’ s buying potential is , their loyalty to the retailer , how effective various offers have been on their buying behavior , and many other use cases .
Packaging and shipping companies may mine data to understand how geography , weather , drivers , packaging , road conditions , and vehicle type influence
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