Kalle Varisvirta explained how to use Drupal as a central hub for Internet of Things connected devices.

1. Serving the Internet of
Things (IoT) with Drupal
Kalle Varisvirta
Technology Director
Exove

2. In this session
What’s Internet of Things? (briefly)
What does my fridge need Drupal for?
How is it actually done?
Content as a service

3. What’s the
Internet
of Things?

4. Internet of Things
Internet of things usually refers just to all things gaining
internet access, from smartwatches to toasters
In this presentation, the definition of the Internet of
Things is based on everyday things gaining internet
connections
home automation, energy equipment, wearables etc.

9. What does
my fridge need
Drupal for?

10. What does Drupal offer?
Drupal offers a platform for content
Drupal offers a platform for easily controllable data
structures and data in it
Drupal offers fine-grained user access control
Drupal offers an online store
Drupal offers user-generated content and the storage
for it

11. Drupal as a back-end
Until Drupal 8, all Drupals returned HTML when getting
GET or POST requests
Drupal 8 changes this in the core, but earlier Drupals
could be made to do the same
When removing the front-end from Drupal, it becomes a
content and service platform that can do more than just
web pages

12. Drupal as a back-end
Decoupling the HTML layer from the content was
originally aimed for flexibility for the front-end, essentially
headless Drupal
It also makes Drupal fully capable of connecting to any
display system, whether HTML-based or native

13. Examples

14. Example: A health
monitoring service
All textual content across
devices, with language
versions, can be easily
stored to Drupal
Changes to content as
well as news and
notifications can be
delivered straight to
people’s wrists from

15. Example: Self-service
gym
A mobile site, where
people could extend
their membership
Drupal can bill monthly,
or support pay-per-use
Smart lock would open
door for to a certain
Drupal user role

16. Example: Online store
for connected fridges
An app in a connected
fridge
A back-end as a Drupal
online store for groceries
Connected to a card
payment system, ERP for
product and balances and
logistics for orders

17. Real world?
We’ve done mutiple implementations with different IoT
devices
Most of them use Drupal for some resources

18. How is it
actually done?

19. Serving machines
Easiest approach is to create a REST API
Drupal 7 has modules for serving (or helping to serve)
all data out via a REST API
Services, RestWS, RESTful and JS module or
Endpoint for those looking for something more exotic
Drupal 8 ships with a REST module in core

20. Serving machines
Any service directed to behead a Drupal might not be
suitable as is for serving any machine out there
For example Drupal 8’s REST API is very Drupal-specific
out-of-the-box
You should separate your Drupal’s internal data
structure from the data you’re serving out
Not to make a point by separation, but to allow
versioning and smooth control of the API evolution

21. Serving machines
A proper REST API needs to follow the rules (stateless,
cacheable, layered, uniform)
It also needs to be well-documented for integrations
Security, both by access and transit, need to be
considered
Also, take into account possibly needed changes by
versioning your REST feed

22. Serving machines
An Open API with proper documentation is a good way
to open up your resources for all the networked things
out there, but it’s not at all always enough
Many times you’ll have to integrate to a machine - even
if you might feel the architecture would be better served
if done the other way

23. Connecting to machines
Integrating to machines is different than integrating to
other services running on servers in server halls
It’s combining appalling reliability with poor to useless
network performance
And you’ll be connecting to 1 or 10 000 units

24. Connecting to machines
For connecting to machines, you’ll always have
implement a proper connection architecture
Simplest architectures would use queuing to prevent
failed connections from losing data
More elegant approach would be some kind of
messaging system, observer or publish/subscribe
design patterns

25. Content
as a
service

26. Let’s take a plunge
with Drupal
architectures

27. There was a
time when
just a Drupal
website was
enough.
There are still
times like
that.

28. But then we
needed a
couple of
integrations.

29. And then a
mobile app,
which we
would serve
with ready-
made HTML
or a JSON
view.

30. But then we
wanted a
Javascript
front-end
and opted to
go with a
headless
Drupal.

31. And suddenly,
we could just
open our REST
interface to the
world and let
everything on
the internet
integrate.

32. And if Drupal
couldn’t perform
to take care of
all the traffic,
we’d move it as
the enterprise
content
management
storage and
delivery system.

33. Content
as a
service

34. Building an external API
Sometimes the only solution is to not use Drupal for the
API, but serve the content to a separate system building
the API
I’ve talked about this in my “Accelerating headless
Drupal with Node.JS” presentation

35. Building an external API
In this approach you’ll index all your content outside
Drupal every time it’s edited
To a MongoDB, SOLR, Elasticsearch, Redis or
whatever serves your purpose
Writes pass through to Drupal or are queued in the
external API layer and then executed to Drupal
External API layer is built performance-oriented, with
e.g. Node.JS or Go

36. Building an external API
Serving just content might not be enough, you might
also need to front some Drupal services, like
authentication or authorization
All services that can be, should be cached on the
external API layer

37. Building an external API
Enables you to have full control over the API
Enables you to aggregate and mix data from multiple
sources, like adding pricing information to Drupal’s
products from ERP - this is one of the principes of REST
And you’ll get blazing performance, if you do it right

39. Taking Drupal to
enterprise
When trying to get Drupal to that “enterprise
background system” -level, you’ll might find resistance
Enterprise architects would like to keep to world
Microsoft-only or traditional enterprise software-only and
let Drupal stay outside, handling only the sites

40. Recap

41. Internet of things
Is a buzzword and means a lot of things, but usually just
devices not originally designed to be connected, but
that are getting connected these days
Can use Drupal for content or for a variety of services,
like authentication and authorization

42. How to do it?
Creating a REST API is the most straightforward of
solutions
Drupal 7 has a couple of really good REST API
modules, but Drupal 8 has REST in core
API should be versioned or backwards compatible
Sometimes a REST API isn’t enough, but you need to
adapt to the client’s (bad) way of connecting

43. And then…?
Move your API outside of Drupal for performance, better
control or aggregation of services
Index Drupal’s content outside to MongoDB and front
the services with a Node.JS layer

44. Thank you!

45. Questions?
Thank you!