Why use MIC

You’re probably wondering “what does MIC has to offer for me?”.

There are several components, both known and unknown to most of us, when creating a full-blown IoT infrastructure. It’s easy to say “I’ll just spin up a SQL database and pipe all my data to it”, but how will you connect your IoT devices through LoRaWAN / NB-IoT, handle realtime updates, structure a fleet of e.g. 100+ IoT devices and query gigabytes of data stored years ago? MIC has all the answers to these problems.

Storage

MIC is mainly built on top of AWS. It utilized the Simple Storage Service (S3) for long term data storage. This data is indexed by the extremely powerful Elasticsearch indexing engine which gives you an intuitive querying interface to retrieve data however you want for later analysis.

The best part: all you have to do is send data to the platform and the rest is handled for you.

Realtime

MIC maintains a MQTT broker which is part of AWS IoT. What this means is that you can utilize a MQTT client in any language/platform (supporting X.509 certificates) for both listening on incoming data and send data downlink to your IoT devices.

Rules Engine

MIC provides a highly configurable Rules Engine which lets you trigger custom events such as HTTP web-hooks or sending email/sms based on predefined conditions. This lets you chain events based on incoming data from your IoT devices.

Structuring Your Infrastructure

MIC provides an intuitive way to structure your IoT infrastructure. Thing Types act as classes for defining common traits of similar Things. In this way you can easily add more Things to already existing groups of Thing Types.

Access Management

Users and Thing Types can be sorted under domains. Use sub-domains to create a domain-tree of which users get different access to parts of your infrastructure.

These are some of the features included in the Managed IoT Cloud suite. I hope you’ve got an overview of what’s in store. Next we’ll start by setting up an IoT device.