The IoT Aptilabs platform is hardware-agnostic. You can integrate pretty much any device, starting from those powered by fully-functional operating systems, all the way down to resource-constrained microcontrollers with less than 10 KB of available RAM. There are many platforms that are already pre-integrated and verified with IoT Aptilabs, but even if you don’t see a particular platform listed , there is a good chance that it can be easily integrated using IoT Aptilab’s highly portable SDKs. They are now available in Java, C++, and C: just pick one that suits your case.

IoT Aptilabs can handle both structured and unstructured data, but favors the former. Well-structured data provides excellent material for any manipulation and analytics.
This kind of data also helps abstract out any unimportant details of the low-level implementation and your hardware. IoT Aptilabs ensures that even gadgets based on very different technologies can be managed and operated identically, as long as they share the same set of data schemas. This is why in every aspect of its functionality, IoT Aptilab makes use of a corresponding data schema that governs the semantics and generates a lot of boilerplate code automatically. Schemas are Apache Avro compatible, and thus, very powerful. Apache Avro also allows data serialization to be very efficient.
Once you start working with IoT Aptilabs, you will quickly find yourself in a data schemas state of mind — and that’s a good thing.

IoT Aptilabs endpoint SDKs are available in Java, C++, and C, and are designed to be embedded into your client application (or firmware). They handle client-server communication, authentication, data marshalling, encryption, persistence, and other functions provided by the platform.

Each generated SDK is fitted for your particular server instance. The generated SDKs contain server-specific data schemas translated into object bindings for your IoT application. The SDKs also have the knowledge of the transport layer protocol implementation in use, as well as how to establish communication with that specific server instance at which the SDK was generated.

IoT Aptilab is transport-agnostic. It allows building applications that function over any type of network connection — either persistent or intermittent. You may choose one of the existing transport protocol implementations that come with IoT Aptilab, or create custom-tailored transports and plug them into your system. IoT Aptilab will automatically advertise the connection parameters to endpoints and balance the load across the servers in the cluster.

Advanced platform users may find it handy that IoT Aptilab is able to flexibly assign transport implementations to platform services. For example, notifications may be delivered to endpoints via UDP or SMS while configuration and profile data may be synced via an AES-encrypted TCP-based binary protocol.

IoT Aptilabs can be effectively used to enable advanced IoT features for gateways and Wi-Fi routers. With the IoT Aptilabs functionality on board, these devices can act as an inexpensive yet multi-functional bridge between the endpoints and the IoT

IoT Aptilabs-powered gateways and routers can largely simplify data collection from simple sensors or devices that use PAN-based protocols such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, or Z-Wave for connectivity. They can also be used to streamline the process of adding new devices to the given IoT cluster by converting the device’s data format into the “common tongue” used in the cluster.

For massive amounts of real-time data or large-scale deployments, IoT Aptilab allows implementing the edge analytics into IoT gateways, which is preliminary data processing and data aggregating performed by an IoT gateway before sending out a bulk of data to the IoT Aptilab server/cloud. In this way, the traffic load in the network can be reduced by ten times or more, leading to substantial savings in the server equipment or rented cloud processing facilities.

The IoT Aptilabs server acts as a foundation for your custom-tailored IoT back-end system. It offers a number of mechanisms for internal customization and integration with external systems: REST interfaces for integration with product-specific services, log appenders for integration with analytics, data management and visualization systems, pluggable implementations of custom transports, and other modules

The IoT Aptilab server is usually deployed as a cluster of nodes, which is easily expandable as soon as higher performance is required. The IoT Aptilab server architecture also eliminates the risk of downtime by enabling the high availability mode and precluding a single point of failure in the cluster. The IoT Aptilab cluster uses Apache Zookeeper for coordination of servers, primary node elections, and failure mitigation. Since IoT Aptilab is a 100% open-source platform, it can be easily deployed on premises, in cloud, or in a mixed mode.
The IoT Aptilab server was designed to handle millions of connected devices under peak pressure without ever getting tired.

Collecting and analyzing data from connected devices is one of the most recurring IoT use cases. IoT Aptilab’s mission is to make these tasks totally straightforward, even at massive scale. Based on the log schema you design for your application, the IoT Aptilab server constructs object bindings and APIs for your custom-tailored SDK. You then use these APIs to instruct IoT Aptilabs to deliver log records to the back-end data processing and/or warehousing system. A IoT Aptilab endpoint temporarily caches log records and sends them to the server as soon as an upload trigger fires. Both temporary data cache implementation and upload triggers are pluggable and customizable.

On the server side, IoT Aptilab acts as a swiss army knife of data injection, supporting a framework of pluggable log appenders you use to load data into the database of your choice, to send this data to stream processing, or to make it available to custom data processing modules via REST, Flume, etc. Thus, with IoT Aptilab, you can do the data processing and analytics with your favorite tools, which is especially easy because IoT Aptilab ensures end-to-end structured data flow.