Preface

Our biggest hope with this book is that we’ve done a good job of providing you with a deep overview of what the future of the Internet of Things (IoT) might look like. Despite the oceans of e-ink used every day to talk about the IoT, we know that practical and authoritative content about this topic is still hard to come by. We hope that this book will bring some order to the chaos by proposing a pragmatic and structured methodology to building IoT devices and services, one inherited from our own experience building large-scale commercial systems for connected devices.

Because every actor wants to get a slice of the future pie, there are literally hundreds of competing standards for connected devices. The “my protocol is better than yours” attitude has been the major cause of the fragmentation of the IoT world and the reason why it’s plagued by constant wheel reinventions and a severe lack of proper innovation. All existing applications, tools, and mechanisms need to include support for every new protocol that appears. And with the hundreds of protocols already out there that need to be integrated and maintained—well, you get the idea!