Tiny Containers for IoT in New Nubix.io Developer Edition -- ADTmag

Tiny Containers for IoT in New Nubix.io Developer Edition

By Richard Seeley
October 8, 2019

Developers working on IoT apps have a "tiny container" option as part of the Nubix.io Developer Edition, which supports the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone platforms.

"With Nubix.io, programmers have access to a library of sensors, analytics and tiny services that leverage open source languages and pre-packaged functions to create IoT applications in minutes," the San Francisco-based company said in a press release last week announcing the new product.

Tiny containers are needed because existing containers are too big and have memory requirements that are not available with IoT devices, and developers don't have the option to shrink their edge computing apps to fit, the company said.

"While IoT gateways bring some processing closer to the source of streaming data, only Nubix.io containers are sized in kilobytes, not megabytes, which is easily 100 times smaller than a Docker container, and small enough to be placed at the real edge -- right on to the chips and sensors used by IoT devices," according to the release.

Nubix.io said its patent-pending technology is designed to work with the constraints of microcontrollers and single board computers (SBCs) and allows analytics to run directly on an IoT device avoiding connectivity issues involved in data transfer from large numbers of sensors.

"There's tremendous analytic, machine learning and AI intelligence to unlock from sensors and chips being used in the billions of IoT sensors and devices on the market," Rachel Taylor, Nubix.io CEO, said in a statement. "But even small sensors can generate more than a terabyte of data a day. It's expensive, impractical - or even impossible - to move that much data to IoT gateways or the cloud for real-time analysis. Nubix.io brings the familiarity of open, cloud-based programming and containers to a platform purpose-built to run directly on sensors and microcontrollers that won't disrupt the rigid architecture and condition of billions of IoT devices deployed worldwide."

Nubix.io listed features for the Developer Edition including:

Drag-and-drop components and functions for building and testing applications
Sensor support designed so developers can focus on application logic and analytics rather than hardware plumbing
Container-Based Deployment Over the Air (OTA) with hardware abstraction

Carrying through with the Nubix.io tiny theme, the company said the product provides tiny services for edge-native applications, including: