The Internet of Things - Why Cloudsmith Plays a Crucial Role

IoT is slowly, quietly taking over the world. A few years ago, self-ordering fridges, driverless cars, and fully automated homes seemed like the stuff of dreams. And while the technology exists, rollout and adoption is slower than anticipated, amidst security and privacy concerns. That said, IoT is the future, and growth is steady, as the challenges of building and maintaining hundreds of thousands of devices per vendor are getting solved.

Today, there are billions of devices online; with an ultra-wide and global dispersal pattern from the factories that built them. Each device runs firmware, or more commonly a light-weight embedded OS and software written in performant languages like C++ or Rust or more accessible languages like Java or Python.

A company building the latest smart TV, or Fridge, or Japanese-style automated toilet needs to ship their device, fully loaded with working software to control the device, connect to the internet to provide analytics back to HQ and get new versioned updates to introduce new features - or most importantly, to receive security patches.

And that’s where Cloudsmith comes in.

Cloudsmith provides a distribution toolkit for IoT that helps to solve the issues with global rollout at scale.

Global Infrastructure At The Edge

If you need fast, reliable deployment infrastructure; look no further. Cloudsmith provides accelerated edge delivery of software to allow you to stay close to the sea of devices you want to manage. And what’s more, the caching of your packages and artifacts at the edge is configurable, because there is no one-size-fits-all solution.  Your needs are bespoke, and Cloudsmith gives you the control to define a best-fit solution for your own needs.

Entitlement Tokens

Cloudsmith enables you to automate the rollout of software using a unique token to manage repository access for each device. Entitlement tokens are read-only access tokens for a Cloudsmith Repository and they can be created to nearly any secure standard.

You can attach metadata; allowing you to store additional information for the device. You can add restrictions to the token; such as a validity period, a specific allowable device IP address or a maximum number of downloads. Each token can be individually managed and filtered to provide tight control of your IP. All of which is accessible via the Cloudsmith first-class API.

Analytics

Track and monitor which devices have received the latest update. You can attribute each download from Cloudsmith to the specific Entitlement Token used, and you can see when and from where it was used. You can also export this data for further ingest into your own big data or analytics platform of choice, giving you an unparalleled view over the status of your IoT fleet and their package/updates status.

Universality

Cloudsmith repositories are fully multi-tenant for package formats. This means you can store all of the package types that we support in one repository, and this repository still works as a native repo with all of the client-side tooling for each format. No more managing multiple repositories if your IoT devices need Debian packages, Python packages and even more.  Simplify your package management, and gain more control.

In Summary

Cloudsmith provides a “low-gravity” launchpad for IoT software updates at scale. Let us worry about performance, delivery and scalability while you concentrate on building secure software your customers will love.

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