dystudio / foglamp

An open source platform for the Internet of Things, it acts as an edge gateway between sensor devices and cloud storage systems

FogLAMP

This is the FogLAMP project.

FogLAMP is an open source platform for the Internet of Things, and an essential component in Fog Computing. It uses a modular microservices architecture including sensor data collection, storage, processing and forwarding to historians, Enterprise systems and Cloud-based services. FogLAMP can run in highly available, stand alone, unattended environments that assume unreliable network connectivity.

FogLAMP also provides a means of buffering data coming from sensors and forwarding that data onto high level storage systems. It assumes the underlying network layer is not always connected or may not be reliable. Data from sensors may be stored within FogLAMP for a number of days before being purged from the FogLAMP storage. During this time it may be sent to one or more historians and also accessed via a REST API for use by local analytical applications.

FogLAMP has been designed to run in a Linux environment and makes use of Linux services.

Architecture

FogLAMP is built using a microservices architecture for major component areas, these services consist of:

• a Core service responsible for the management of the other services, the external REST API's, scheduling and monitoring of activities.
• a South service responsible for the communication between FogLAMP and the sensors/actuators.
• a Storage service responsible for the persistance of configuration and metrics and the buffering of sensor data.

FogLAMP makes extensive use of plugin components in order to increase the flexibility of the implementation:

• South plugins are used to allow for the easy expansion of FogLAMP to deal with new South devices and South device connection buses.
• North plugins are used to allow for connection to different historians
• Datastore plugins are used to allow FogLAMP to use different storage mechanisms for persisting meta data and the sensor data
• Authentication provider plugins are used to allow the authentication mechanism to be matched with enterprise requirements or provided internally by FogLAMP.

The other paradigm that is used extensively within FogLAMP is the idea of scheduling processes to perform specific operations. The FogLAMP core contains a scheduler which can execute processes based on time schedules or triggered by events. This is used to start processes when an event occurs, such as FogLAMP starting, or based on a time trigger.

Scheduled processes are used to send data from FogLAMP to the historian, to purge data from the FogLAMP data buffer, to gather statistics for historical analysis and perform backups of the FogLAMP environment.

Building FogLAMP

Build Prerequisites

FogLAMP is currently based on C/C++ and Python code. The packages needed to build and run FogLAMP are:

• autoconf
• automake
• avahi-daemon
• build-essential
• cmake
• curl
• g++
• libtool
• libboost-dev
• libboost-system-dev
• libboost-thread-dev
• libpq-dev
• libssl-dev
• libz-dev
• make
• postgresql
• python3-pip
• python-dev
• python3-dev
• uuid-dev
• sqlite3
• libsqlite3-dev

Linux distributions

FogLAMP can be built or installed in one of the following Linux distributions :

• Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04
• Raspbian
• Red Hat 7.6
• CentOS 7.6

Install the prerequisites on Ubuntu

On Ubuntu-based Linux distributions the packages can be installed with given requirements.sh or manual apt-get:

apt-get install avahi-daemon curl
apt-get install cmake g++ make build-essential autoconf automake uuid-dev
apt-get install libtool libboost-dev libboost-system-dev libboost-thread-dev libpq-dev libssl-dev libz-dev
apt-get install python-dev python3-dev python3-pip
apt-get install postgresql
apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev

You may need to use sudo to allow apt-get to install packages dependent upon your access rights.

Install the prerequisites on Red Hat/CentOS

On Red Hat and CentOS distributions the required packages can be installed automatically with given requirements.sh:

sudo ./requirements.sh

You should run this as a user with sudo access rights.

Build

To build FogLAMP run the command make in the top level directory. This will compile all the components that need to be compiled and will also create a runable structure of the Python code components of FogLAMP.

NOTE:

• The GCC compiler version 5.4 available in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS raises warnings. This is a known bug of the compiler and it can be ignored.
• openssl toolkit is a requirement if we want to use https based REST client and certificate based authentication.

Once the make has completed you can decide to test FogLAMP from your development environment or you can install it.

Testing FogLAMP from Your Development Environment

you can test FogLAMP directly from your Development Environment. All you need to do is to set one environment variable to be able to run FogLAMP from the development tree.

export FOGLAMP_ROOT=<basedir>/FogLAMP

Where basedir is the base directory into which you cloned the FogLAMP repository.

Finally, start the FogLAMP core daemon:

$FOGLAMP_ROOT/scripts/foglamp start

Installing FogLAMP

Create an installation by executing make install, then set the FOGLAMP_ROOT environment variable specifying the installation path. By default the installation will be placed in /usr/local/foglamp. You may need to execute sudo make install to install FogLAMP where the current user does not have permissions:

sudo make install
export FOGLAMP_ROOT=/usr/local/foglamp

The destination may be overriden by setting the variable DESTDIR in the make command line, to a location in which you wish to install FogLAMP. For example, to install FogLAMP in the /opt directory use the command:

sudo make install DESTDIR=/opt
export FOGLAMP_ROOT=/opt/usr/local/foglamp

Executing FogLAMP

FogLAMP is now ready to start. Use the command:

$FOGLAMP_ROOT/bin/foglamp start

To check if FogLAMP is running, use the command:

$FOGLAMP_ROOT/bin/foglamp status

The command returns the status of FogLAMP on the machine it has been executed.

If You Use PostgreSQL: Creating the Database Repository

This version of FogLAMP relies on SQLite to run. SQLite is embedded into the Storage service, but you may want to use PostgreSQL as a buffer and metadata storage (refer to the documentation on ReadTheDocs for more info. With a version of PostgreSQL installed via apt-get first you need to create a new database user with:

sudo -u postgres createuser -d <user>

where user is the name of the Linux user that will run FogLAMP. The FogLAMP database user must have createdb privileges (i.e. the -d argument).