Backend for End User IoT Applications

AnythingDB

Altair SmartWorks AnythingDB allows our users to create a digital model of the world that their applications can interact with.

AnythingDB is a specially designed, flexible, secure database to help smart product developers create a model and then display it in their application. It helps you capture and access metadata for devices, processes, users, tasks, or any other entity which is considered in your application. AnythingDB is the backbone of your application, providing context to analytics and a digital twin to applications. With AnythingDB, you can:
  • Create schemas and relationships in a single category as it uses Json to define entities
  • Validate data easily as it handles intuitive entity definition standard and is flexible when modeling new things
  • Access exactly the data you want as it automatically generates REST endpoints and MQTT topics for entities and their properties
  • Easily access data and determine what data should be on request, and what data should be pushed immediately
  • Provide fine-grained access control over your entities, so only the right users get access to privileged information
AnythingDB also:
  • Provides control over what entities each user can access thereby creating a good user experience by giving them the right amount of control and data at each time
  • Is ACID compliant, multi-tenant, and autoscaling
  • Provides automatic backups to ensure no data is lost
  • Provides contextual information to connect with telemetry analytics and AI Models
  • Generate alerts and store events logs

Functions

Altair SmartWorks Functions allows developers to build a smart product application by writing code in the most popular languages, and automatically deploying the code without provisioning servers, or building an API, or maintaining the infrastructure. It makes the process of establishing the logic for complex applications easy. With Functions, you can:
  • Implement artificial intelligence models such as for predicting future values or identifying image content
  • Incorporate system models and physics models to build digital twins or compare simulated results with actual results
  • Access your functions automatically through your API
  • create custom business rules and execute code based on various triggers – from HTTP requests, devices, database, or platform events. Functions invocation can also be scheduled
  • Automatically scale and optimize the infrastructure

Access Control

Altair SmartWorks Access Control is the management mechanism to set authorization rules for every part of your IoT platform.

For better security, proof of authentication and authorization is needed throughout the SmartWorks platform. It leverages access token as the proof for the request. The token lifecycle in the SmartWorks platform is based on OAuth.

Your application may warrant careful control over which users have access to specific information from your smart product ecosystem. SmartWorks provides a powerful, fine-grained access control toolset for this purpose. With these tools you can create roles, assign specific permissions to identified users, control external access to the application, and provision security keys. With Access Control you can now:

  • Have an overview of the users who have access to your environment - either through the SmartWorks Studio interface or through an end user application
  • Define either generalized or fine-grained access control policies limiting users to specific information from your smart product ecosystem
  • Offer role-based access control by defining the roles with their associated group of policies and assign it to your devices, users, or application
  • Invite your colleagues by providing controlled access to collaborate for faster development
  • Create apps to link SmartWorks to external sources of information, and use scopes to limit their capacity

EdgeOps

Altair SmartWorks EdgeOps provides a set of tools to efficiently manage your edge setup. Increasingly, automation and intelligence need to run very close to sources of data collection, at the edge. Traditional software require a reliable, high-bandwidth internet connection and huge, scalable hardware servers to run it all, and is therefore not suitable for the purpose. And that is where EdgeOps helps you to build, manage, and scale automation and intelligence at the edge.

EdgeOps comprises of an edge-optimized platform to accelerate edge development, and brings modern web development methodology to the edge, with a capability to massively scale the applications there. With EdgeOps you can:
  • Create an edge cluster by installing atop an existing OS or by generating an installer image for bare metal install
  • Assemble, deploy, monitor, and continuously improve applications at the edge using a management console
  • Interact with all the clusters in the ecosystem
  • Create or update Kubernetes resources at edge using the resource catalog
  • Build configurations from the resources created previously to deploy different services on edge
  • Monitor cluster metrics, such as CPU and memory
  • Directly access the cluster’s API interface through the API client
  • Support Edge-to-cloud sync with Thing MQTT connection setup in a single API call

Edge Compute Platform

Altair SmartWorks Edge Compute Platform is an open-architecture platform for the edge. It consists of a collection of micro-services designed to run on low resource boards (like a Raspberry Pi) as well as scaling up to industrial gateways. The services are containerized (docker) for deployment on K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes built for IoT and Edge Computing. The Edge Compute Platform extends a lot of value:
  • Provides numerous (flexible) deployment possibilities by adding other services in addition to the ones needed to run the Edge Compute Platform
  • Management and orchestration can be done from the cloud using Altair SmartWorks Studio
  • Inter-service communication is message based (AMPQ - Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) allowing scaling and separation of services (they can run “anywhere”)
  • Cloud connectivity for configuration and management is not needed since all can be done through the local API; for remote deployment (firewalled) the cloud service can connect to an MQTT broker and expose the API
  • Device connectivity is done through “device driver services” with services written for various protocols; the device drivers are considered external to the core services and interact with the Edge Compute Platform using an API
  • Plug-in or “support services” - third party services - can interact with the rest of the system using the API and can subscribe to telemetry data, perform calculations and publish the results as telemetry
  • Additional device drivers or plugin services can be written by anyone and in any language.
  • Atomic over-the-air updates with rollback supported through the active/inactive partition install on bare metal. A downloadable installer image can be created in Studio

Marketplace

Altair SmartWorks Marketplace provides the users with predefined sets of applications for the Edge. Thanks to it, users can conveniently browse, discover, and import the Edge application to their own project space to build and manage the Edge solution at scale in a few clicks.

When a new version is added to an application listed in the Marketplace, it automatically becomes available as an update to the imported Edge Application.

SmartWorks Marketplace contains applications that run on the Edge, starting from pre-defined sets of applications built by our engineers, third-party applications to any other container-based applications you want to install at the Edge can be defined in the Marketplace.