6 ms·

Show HN: Lightweight Microservices Architecture for the Internet of Things

94 points by andreareginato 11y ago

davidw 11y ago
Andrea, you should point out some examples of this in use - as it is, it looks kind of dry. I see there are a few things filed under 'tutorials', but I'd add it more prominently.
- andreareginato 11y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion David. I'll bo my best to add some more examples. Do you have something specific in mind?
zellyn 11y ago
Is this weave/brillo but not Google?
adambrod 11y ago
Not trying to troll but wouldn't it be easier to just use Elixir and Phoenix with OTP to run microservices for IoT? IoT typically will have long lived connections and Erlang was built on computers much smaller than raspberry pi's. Perhaps i'm not fully grasping the library though.
- playing_colours 11y ago
  My thoughts are similar :) I work in IOT and we use Scala, Akka for the backend. Recently I am checking Elixir / OTP and think it would make a great candidate for IOT microservices with a lot of IO, routing and dispatching. OTP can suit very good for microservices.
- davidw 11y ago
  Andrea's been working on this since before Elixir was 'a thing'. Erlang would indeed be a fine language to implement this kind of thing with.
- andreareginato 11y ago
  I agree with what you say. If starting right now Scala and Elixir would be the who choices I would be looking for. I started in Ruby and Node because of my personal knowledge with these languages and because they are widely used by open source communities. Nonetheless, I would also say that the specific blocks taking care of the hardware communication can be easily replaced, adding the right technology to the right service.
dchuk 11y ago
Does anyone know what theme/tool is being used for those docs? (http://dev.lelylan.com/ http://dev.lelylan.com/)
- vicentereig 11y ago
  It's just a Rails app: https://github.com/lelylan/dev/blob/master/app/views/pages/support/_overview.html.erb https://github.com/lelylan/dev/blob/master/app/views/pages/s...
- mmanfrin 11y ago
  As vicentereig said, structure is just a rails view; theme is bootstrap with some customization: https://github.com/lelylan/dev/blob/master/app/assets/stylesheets/application.css.scss https://github.com/lelylan/dev/blob/master/app/assets/styles...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
whalesalad 11y ago
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton This looks like an extremely feature-complete and cool piece of software but the name needs to be revisited.
- alttab 11y ago
  there's actually only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.
  - bpicolo 11y ago
    If there's anything the SAT tried to prepare us for...
alttab 11y ago
So, its a distributed system architecture using SOA principles. Looks like there's some hand-waving about implementing a couple of obvious interfaces when applying this technical approach to IoT. From what I gathered - this "framework" is nothing but a specification, and doesn't actually do anything for you. Am I missing something?
- bri3d 11y ago
  Yes. That repository is just the architecture documentation. Check out the GitHub organization and you'll find that it's all implemented: https://github.com/lelylan https://github.com/lelylan
  - alttab 11y ago
    So it's Middleware.
staticvar 11y ago
In the Internet of Things, either devices will send data to one server that other Applications subscribe to or devices will send data directly to the Applications. This one of many examples of a server that devices can send data to. In contrast, Open Pipe Kit project (http://openpipekit.github.io http://openpipekit.github.io) is an effort to empower devices to send data directly to Applications by utilizing the power of the Unix Pipe.
dev360 11y ago
Mongodb sounds like a disaster for IoT backend. Sorry for hatred but just can't see that scaling well.
- mring33621 11y ago
  It's IoT Scale!
  - smoyer 11y ago
    I guess most people here will get your reference - piling on, you need even less framework if you just pipe your data to /dev/null.
    - dev360 11y ago
      THAT is an interesting setup for a nosql microservice.
- progrocks9 11y ago
  Why is that bad? Mongodb is great for data ingestion.
  - abrookewood 11y ago
    MongoDB has a reputation for losing data. I'll try to find the reference. EDIT: http://www.mongodb-is-web-scale.com/ http://www.mongodb-is-web-scale.com/ https://aphyr.com/posts/322-call-me-maybe-mongodb-stale-reads https://aphyr.com/posts/322-call-me-maybe-mongodb-stale-read...
    - progrocks9 11y ago
      In some IoT scenarios you could afford losing a little bit of data. For instance this component does it with MongoDB https://github.com/telefonicaid/fiware-orion https://github.com/telefonicaid/fiware-orion
  - 11y ago
Pharaoh2 11y ago
The title does not do justice to the project. Lelylan seems to be to IoT what rails is to web app development. The title sound very underwhelming, my first thought was, well I can just use zeromq with service discovery. But Lelylan is much more than that it seems to provide an opinionated full stack framework for create IoT and related services. The description from GitHub is much better, Lelylan is an iot cloud platform based on a lightweight microservices architecture. Look here www.lelylan.com to get a much better idea about what it is.
Dowwie 11y ago
the mother of click bait titles
- dang 11y ago
  Pretty sure we do better than that on a regular basis.
iclosem 11y ago
Dumb question: I've looked through the demo and the tutorials and I'd like to know how does this compare to using something like OpenHab?
- andreareginato 11y ago
  As far as I know of OpenHAB, I would say that lelylan main difference consists on the microservices architecture. What they actually do, is pretty similar.
anonfunction 11y ago
Where's the code? I just see docs and images in the repo.
- sciurus 11y ago
  https://github.com/lelylan https://github.com/lelylan
- andreareginato 11y ago
  Here you can find the services list https://github.com/lelylan/lelylan#development https://github.com/lelylan/lelylan#development. Any idea to avoid this problem? I just added a note section in the beginning of the documentation to mitigate it.
Marinlemaignan 11y ago
looks good for noobs like me
progrocks9 11y ago
I'm wondering if using Apache Kafka and Hadoop Stack, would be a better approach for IoT.
- andreareginato 11y ago
  I think so. I'm investigating on it.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
induscreep 11y ago
Can someone tell me what problem it solves that other architectures don't? All I see is a lot of buzzwords and very little technical details on why it is better...
elcct 11y ago
Bizarre choice of tech for a project called "lightweight". I'll pass.
- andreareginato 11y ago
  The choice of using lightweight comes out from the fact that each service in lelylan solve one specific problem, which make it easy to replace or extend existing and new functionalities. I'll think about a more proper word to express it.

Andrea, you should point out some examples of this in use - as it is, it looks kind of dry. I see there are a few things filed under 'tutorials', but I'd add it more prominently.

andreareginato 11y ago
Thanks for the suggestion David. I'll bo my best to add some more examples. Do you have something specific in mind?

zellyn 11y ago

Is this weave/brillo but not Google?

adambrod 11y ago

Not trying to troll but wouldn't it be easier to just use Elixir and Phoenix with OTP to run microservices for IoT? IoT typically will have long lived connections and Erlang was built on computers much smaller than raspberry pi's. Perhaps i'm not fully grasping the library though.

playing_colours 11y ago
My thoughts are similar :) I work in IOT and we use Scala, Akka for the backend. Recently I am checking Elixir / OTP and think it would make a great candidate for IOT microservices with a lot of IO, routing and dispatching. OTP can suit very good for microservices.
davidw 11y ago
Andrea's been working on this since before Elixir was 'a thing'. Erlang would indeed be a fine language to implement this kind of thing with.
andreareginato 11y ago
I agree with what you say. If starting right now Scala and Elixir would be the who choices I would be looking for. I started in Ruby and Node because of my personal knowledge with these languages and because they are widely used by open source communities. Nonetheless, I would also say that the specific blocks taking care of the hardware communication can be easily replaced, adding the right technology to the right service.

dchuk 11y ago

Does anyone know what theme/tool is being used for those docs? (http://dev.lelylan.com/ http://dev.lelylan.com/)

vicentereig 11y ago
It's just a Rails app: https://github.com/lelylan/dev/blob/master/app/views/pages/support/_overview.html.erb https://github.com/lelylan/dev/blob/master/app/views/pages/s...
mmanfrin 11y ago
As vicentereig said, structure is just a rails view; theme is bootstrap with some customization: https://github.com/lelylan/dev/blob/master/app/assets/stylesheets/application.css.scss https://github.com/lelylan/dev/blob/master/app/assets/styles...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

whalesalad 11y ago

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton This looks like an extremely feature-complete and cool piece of software but the name needs to be revisited.

alttab 11y ago
there's actually only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.
- bpicolo 11y ago
  If there's anything the SAT tried to prepare us for...

alttab 11y ago

So, its a distributed system architecture using SOA principles. Looks like there's some hand-waving about implementing a couple of obvious interfaces when applying this technical approach to IoT. From what I gathered - this "framework" is nothing but a specification, and doesn't actually do anything for you. Am I missing something?

bri3d 11y ago
Yes. That repository is just the architecture documentation. Check out the GitHub organization and you'll find that it's all implemented: https://github.com/lelylan https://github.com/lelylan
- alttab 11y ago
  So it's Middleware.

staticvar 11y ago

In the Internet of Things, either devices will send data to one server that other Applications subscribe to or devices will send data directly to the Applications. This one of many examples of a server that devices can send data to. In contrast, Open Pipe Kit project (http://openpipekit.github.io http://openpipekit.github.io) is an effort to empower devices to send data directly to Applications by utilizing the power of the Unix Pipe.

dev360 11y ago

Mongodb sounds like a disaster for IoT backend. Sorry for hatred but just can't see that scaling well.

mring33621 11y ago
It's IoT Scale!
- smoyer 11y ago
  I guess most people here will get your reference - piling on, you need even less framework if you just pipe your data to /dev/null.
  - dev360 11y ago
    THAT is an interesting setup for a nosql microservice.
progrocks9 11y ago
Why is that bad? Mongodb is great for data ingestion.
- abrookewood 11y ago
  MongoDB has a reputation for losing data. I'll try to find the reference. EDIT: http://www.mongodb-is-web-scale.com/ http://www.mongodb-is-web-scale.com/ https://aphyr.com/posts/322-call-me-maybe-mongodb-stale-reads https://aphyr.com/posts/322-call-me-maybe-mongodb-stale-read...
  - progrocks9 11y ago
    In some IoT scenarios you could afford losing a little bit of data. For instance this component does it with MongoDB https://github.com/telefonicaid/fiware-orion https://github.com/telefonicaid/fiware-orion
- 11y ago

Pharaoh2 11y ago

The title does not do justice to the project. Lelylan seems to be to IoT what rails is to web app development. The title sound very underwhelming, my first thought was, well I can just use zeromq with service discovery. But Lelylan is much more than that it seems to provide an opinionated full stack framework for create IoT and related services. The description from GitHub is much better, Lelylan is an iot cloud platform based on a lightweight microservices architecture. Look here www.lelylan.com to get a much better idea about what it is.

Dowwie 11y ago

the mother of click bait titles

dang 11y ago
Pretty sure we do better than that on a regular basis.

iclosem 11y ago

Dumb question: I've looked through the demo and the tutorials and I'd like to know how does this compare to using something like OpenHab?

andreareginato 11y ago
As far as I know of OpenHAB, I would say that lelylan main difference consists on the microservices architecture. What they actually do, is pretty similar.

anonfunction 11y ago

Where's the code? I just see docs and images in the repo.

sciurus 11y ago
https://github.com/lelylan https://github.com/lelylan
andreareginato 11y ago
Here you can find the services list https://github.com/lelylan/lelylan#development https://github.com/lelylan/lelylan#development. Any idea to avoid this problem? I just added a note section in the beginning of the documentation to mitigate it.

Marinlemaignan 11y ago

looks good for noobs like me

progrocks9 11y ago

I'm wondering if using Apache Kafka and Hadoop Stack, would be a better approach for IoT.

andreareginato 11y ago
I think so. I'm investigating on it.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

induscreep 11y ago

Can someone tell me what problem it solves that other architectures don't? All I see is a lot of buzzwords and very little technical details on why it is better...

elcct 11y ago

Bizarre choice of tech for a project called "lightweight". I'll pass.

andreareginato 11y ago
The choice of using lightweight comes out from the fact that each service in lelylan solve one specific problem, which make it easy to replace or extend existing and new functionalities. I'll think about a more proper word to express it.