Remember the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python) from the late 90’s when the World Wide Web was exploding into the public consciousness? As you’ll recall, LAMP came about as an answer to a set of challenges that the web development community were facing. At that moment, Open Source came to the rescue!

Time has moved on… Our team works predominantly within the Embedded Systems and Internet of Things (IoT) domain, but many of the challenges we face are parallels to those faced by the creators of the LAMP stack. This is why we think that the open source MING (MQtt, InfluxDB, Node-Red and Grafana) stack can enable the next generation of IoT Application developers.

With this masterclass we aim to take attendees through the journey we’ve been on as we’ve been developing Internet of Things solutions.

We talk through how Open Source solutions exist to fulfill these needs today, and how we arrived at the MING stack:

• (M)osquitto for MQTT based assured data-comms using a publication/subscriber model
• (I)nfluxDB for time-series data storage
• (N)ode-Red for intuitive wiring of “nodes” to ingest telemetry data, transform, and deliver internally or to 3rd Parties
• (G)rafana for data-visualisation and alerting

In particular, we will cover how each of these Open Source technologies can be managed and deployed using container platforms such as balena.io with balena “Blocks” to componentize each of the functional blocks within MING, to easily control, configure and update the stack.