Reliable Event Routing in the Cloud and on the Edge

The AgeTech domain poses both opportunities and challenges for the architects of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. Key requirements concern data privacy and cost-efficiency, as well as guaranteed, interoperable delivery of event messages from resource-constrained edge devices to the cloud and consumer applications; public cloud deployments and asynchronous, queue-based messaging are common building blocks of such solutions. This experience report features the conceptual, pattern-oriented design and open source implementation of a custom-built embeddable event router that natively supports the CloudEvents specification from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Our CloudEvents Router introduces standardized event routing targeting the software landscape of the AgeTech startup CARU; this landscape reaches from an embedded microcontroller to cloud-scale services running on Amazon Web Services. The report further analyses the message delivery guarantees given in messaging protocol specifications and their implementations (for instance, MQTT libraries) and presents an alternative delivery management approach, implemented and validated in the open sourced Rust microkernel of the CloudEvents router. The report concludes with lessons learned about messaging edge cases and protocol particularities, in MQTT in particular.