Client Background

Our client provides an IoT Edge Platform that captures real-time data from the IoT gateways and sensors used to monitor the safety and efficiency of industrial operations. The client engaged Xoriant experts to test the IoT Edge Platform using real-world IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) product and simulated data. The key objective was to right-size the IoT Edge Platform through advanced performance and scalability testing, including specialized interoperability and security testing.

Xoriant Solution | Key Contributions

Xoriant conducted performance and scalability tests for right-sizing the IoT Edge Platform. To assess the current environment, Xoriant experts performed port-level firewall testing and enterprise-grade operations at the edge and surrounding environs. Our key contributions include:

Performance and Scalability Testing

• We conducted server sizing testing to ensure the performance, scalability and stability of the IoT Edge Platform.
• To assess the operational efficiency of the platform microservices pods and orchestration engine, we tested performance with VMware vSphere deployments.
• The team used Prometheus and Grafana for performance metrics gathering and data representation. The performance monitoring tools gathered data across hardware resources like CPU, Memory, Disk and Network. We also performance-tested these resources for utilization and latency.
• We conducted scalability tests to check data ingestion performance from sensors to the IoT Edge Platform via the gateway. The platform input data is in JSON format and could be of small (10-20KB), medium (100KB-1MB) or large (10MB) sizes. Therefore, the test parameters used large-sized data coming from hundreds of sensors and small-sized data coming from thousands of sensors.
• Xoriant employed Apache NiFi, an IIoT data simulator, for sensor data generation.

Interoperability Testing

To ensure compatibility with a range of connected devices, we helped the client’s partners/hardware vendors certify the edge servers for cloud-native storage using Kubernetes cluster management.

Security Testing

The security test involved checking for opened and closed firewall ports of the IoT Edge Platform from a remote machine.

High Level Architecture

Key Benefits

• Reduced operations cost and optimized application response time by perfectly sizing the on-prem IoT Edge Platform server.

• Ensured high availability and smooth performance by conducting resiliency testing from client network perspective.

• Helped the client achieve sensor interoperability certification under AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol), MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) set of protocols.

• Enabled client to deliver digital innovations and data insights to their customers.

Technology Stack

Hyperconverged Servers | VMware vSphere 7 | RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 7.7 | Kubernetes | Docker | Apache NiFi | Prometheus and Grafana | Python