An Introduction to Trust Architectures for IoT Devices

Just as application developers generally assume service-oriented design in their web apps, they now need to adopt “trust architecture” principles when building application stacks with connected (IoT) devices. Only then can billions of connected devices safely scale to serve the applications that rely on their data.

Let me introduce you to Trust Architectures for applications that leverage connected devices. A reoccuring theme in my recent articles is that there is a lot to learn about the future of connected devices by looking back through the history of cloud-native development.

Over the past decade, cloud-native developers have embraced service-oriented design for their applications as “the rule.” Application Program Interfaces, APIs, and microservices are the most talked about implementations of these principles, and there are dozens of other developer tools and standards that we all use to build services.

As a quick review of service-oriented design, most narratives focus on highly flexible code functionality that is broken down into small components. These components make their functionalities discoverable and interoperable to other parts of the system. Such an architecture allows these microservices to be reused in the future via simple program interfaces (APIs).

Without such decomposition, scaling applications and adding new functionality to hard-coded applications with monolithic architectures becomes difficult, or even impossible. For example, an analytics microservice could be scaled-up with on-demand cloud hardware independently of the user sign-in service. Or, a new feature could access that analytics service without any changes to the existing service. This is how modern cloud-native apps are able to adapt so quickly.

Open source tools, cloud infrastructure, and a community of knowledge sharing have moved best practices forward for building modern and complex application systems with service architectures.

Modern connected devices utilize standard APIs to communicate with supporting infrastructure, and the ones that don’t, should. However, the nature of connected devices at the edge leaves much to be desired in connected device architectures.