Capture IoT Data With MongoDB in 5 Minutes
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Please note: This article discusses Stitch. Stitch is now MongoDB Realm. All the same features and functionality, now with a new name. Learn more here. We will be updating this article in due course.
Capturing IoT (Internet of Things) data is a complex task for 2 main reasons:
- We have to deal with a huge amount of data so we need a rock solid architecture.
- While keeping a bulletproof security level.
First, let's have a look at a standard IoT capture architecture:
On the left, we have our sensors. Let's assume they can push data every
second over TCP using a
POST and let's suppose we
have a million of them. We need an architecture capable to handle a
million queries per seconds and able to resist any kind of network or
hardware failure. TCP queries need to be distributed evenly to the
application servers using load
balancers and
finally, the application servers are able to push the data to our
multiple
Mongos
routers from our MongoDB Sharded
Cluster.
As you can see, this architecture is relatively complex to install. We
need to:
- buy and maintain a lot of servers,
- make security updates on a regular basis of the Operating Systems and applications,
- have an auto-scaling capability (reduce maintenance cost & enable automatic failover).
This kind of architecture is expensive and maintenance cost can be quite
high as well.
Now let's solve this same problem with MongoDB Stitch!
Once you have created a MongoDB Atlas
cluster, you can attach a
MongoDB Stitch application to it
and then create an HTTP
Service
containing the following code:
1 exports = function(payload, response) { 2 const mongodb = context.services.get("mongodb-atlas"); 3 const sensors = mongodb.db("stitch").collection("sensors"); 4 var body = EJSON.parse(payload.body.text()); 5 body.createdAt = new Date(); 6 sensors.insertOne(body) 7 .then(result => { 8 response.setStatusCode(201); 9 }); 10 };
And that's it! That's all we need! Our HTTP POST service can be reached
directly by the sensors from the webhook provided by MongoDB Stitch like
so:
1 curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"temp":22.4}' https://webhooks.mongodb-stitch.com/api/client/v2.0/app/stitchtapp-abcde/service/sensors/incoming_webhook/post_sensor?secret=test
Because MongoDB Stitch is capable of scaling automatically according to
demand, you no longer have to take care of infrastructure or handling
failovers.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post. I hope you found it useful
and interesting.
If you are looking for a very simple way to get started with MongoDB,
you can do that in just 5 clicks on our MongoDB
Atlas database service in the
cloud.
If you want to query your data sitting in MongoDB Atlas using MongoDB
Stitch, I recommend this article from Michael
Lynn.
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