Introduction

The main purpose of Drogue IoT cloud is to connect applications with devices. For applications the devices are the gateways into the real world. They allow to monitor by acquiring sensor information, or interact with by showing information or controlling actuators.

Of course this diagram over-simplifies the problem. And still, connecting to a device to a simple, single backend application is a trivial task.

So what does Drogue Cloud do? And why is it a more complex than a simple MQTT broker? The following sections will dive into the architecture of Drogue Cloud, and will explain what the benefit of this architecture is.

The following sections will use My device and My application. These are the devices and applications that a user of Drogue Cloud would bring and try to connect. These applications are not provided by Drogue Cloud.

Drogue Device provides tools to create the firmware of such devices if they are embedded micro-controllers. However, Drogue Cloud also allows to integrate larger devices, like Linux systems, gateways and it can integrate with other, existing IoT services.

Drogue Cloud is intended to create an as a service experience. This means that the typical user of Drogue Cloud would not set up and install Drogue Cloud, but use an existing, hosted instance. Still, it is possible to set up your own instance, and use this for only one application and user. However, the decision to make this a shared multi-user system, make some aspects more complicated. Then again, if your setup grows, you shouldn’t have any problems scaling up.

The following section will provide more information about: