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I have been toying with the idea of using gRPC for 'IoT' type devices; not very constrained things like sensors; more like single board computer inbuilt devices like robots, drones and the like. What is needed a interface between device and centralized controller as the devices are developed separately and possible by other companies. So a versioned interface language is a must; and it should not be just in a word document; something programmable like a header file or WSDL or IDL or ProtocolBuffer. Also between device and controller the behavior should be specified for common use case like registration, re-registration etc.This can be in word file or in some non technical document.
The (rpc) interface specification in Protocol Buffer (ver 3) along with the efficient implementation via gRPC is leading me to choose this over CoAP/ LWM2M (Leshan Java and C++ implementation).
Having used both LWM2M and grPC, I would say that gRPC is more developer friendly; interface definition and implementation is fast,compared to OMA LWM2M process.Of course there is no Observer-Notify in gRPC, but for that MQTT should suffice.
Strictly one cannot compare LWM2M to gRPC. LWM2M is not just the interface but defines behavior in lot of IoT cases like BootStrap, Registration, KeepAlive , SW Upgrade etc and its universal HTTP like GET, PUT on an URL type addressable resource makes it very complete. However most of these behaviors can be custom defined with some effort.
Some of the IoT things which we plan to orchestrate are far from little brained devices like bulbs, and more like robots. Has anyone used gRPC for similar purposes. Any success of failure stories to share
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Having used both LWM2M and grPC, I would say that gRPC is more developer friendly; interface definition and implementation is fast,compared to OMA LWM2M process.Of course there is no Observer-Notify in gRPC, but for that MQTT should suffice. Strictly one cannot compare LWM2M to gRPC.
I have been toying with the idea of using gRPC for 'IoT' type devices; not very constrained things like sensors; more like single board computer inbuilt devices like robots, drones and the like. What is needed a interface between device and centralized controller as the devices are developed separately and possible by other companies.
LwM2M (specified by OMA) is a is a protocol group largely built on top of CoAP (specified by the IETF). LwM2M uses a subset of CoAP's capabilities that fit into an architecture of many small devices registering at a large LwM2M server that manages the devices.
CoAP IoT is unreliable protocol due to use of UDP. Hence CoAP messages reach unordered or will get lost when they arrive at destination. To make CoAP as reliable protocol, stop and wait with exponential backoff retransmission feature is incorporated in it.
The thing I would miss in gRPC for IoT are the MQTT MQ capabilities like queueing of messages, broker bridging QoS Parameter. Or for CoAP the Out of Band messages over SMS Transport. In this context gRPC is "just" an RPC framework which assumes to be always connected over TCP.
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I have taken the plunge and used it in a project with connected 'Devices'; These are small computers like Raspberry-pi. Overall it has been good experience; and languages used are C++ and Java mainly and also JavaScript in Node.js . We have used this as Dockerized microservices; Load Balancing is what we have not done; and I read that HTTP/2 based load balancing is tricky; Will update that part; planning to use Kubernetes for that. Overall Container technology with versioned interfaces - GRPC seems like a good fit for (micro) services
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