Principles for Engineering IoT Cloud Systems

Engineering Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud services to provide a coherent software layer for continuous deployment, provision, and execution of applications for various domains is complex. The authors consider whether IoT cloud systems could provide a uniform layer to enable continuous execution of complex applications consisting of diverse types of software components, although these systems are built by integrating and blending IoT infrastructures with cloud-based datacenters. The authors analyze requirements and perspectives for engineering such IoT cloud systems and discuss the main engineering principles that should be supported. They then highlight seven main principles, covering different development and operation phases of IoT cloud systems. To show the importance and feasibility of these principles, they present some of their recent work in providing concepts and tools for IoT cloud systems.