Containerized Application for IoT Devices: Comparison between balenaCloud and Amazon Web Services Approaches

Abstract

Depending on the requirements, the deployment of containerized applications for monitoring Internet of Things devices can be done in Cloud or on the Edge. This paper discusses the design of a containerized application monitoring temperature and humidity for IoT devices in three implementations: (1) balenaCloud for edge deployment; (2) Amazon Web Services cloud with EC2 instances; and (3) dedicated Amazon Web Services IoT service. The experiments showed that there are no significant performance differences between Edge and Cloud deployments regarding the resource consumption. However, for fast and almost effortless action, Amazon Web Services IoT is the go-to option when it comes to serverless applications based on Message Queuing Telemetry Transport. For all-in-one automated fleet management balenaCloud seems to be a good tool for IoT developers.