IoT messages are usually HTTP, WebSockets, and MQTT or some derivative of them.
MQTT is the one that I’m always most interested, but anything works which is what is so great about IoT as a service. MQTT is leveraged greatly by
AWS IoT and
Azure IoT and both services work so well at messaging that you can use either in replacement of something like
RabbitMQ, which my daughter loves because of the rabbit icon. I could write a whole post on MQTT but we’ll leave that for another day.
IoT itself is built upon this messaging. That individual hardware devices have UIDs (unique identifiers) that by their very nature allow them to be unique. The packets of information that are sent back and forth between the device and the host are short messages that require no human interaction.
The best part of this is that you don’t need to hardware for IoT. Everything that you want to interact with should be an IoT message, no matter if it is an email, data query or text message. Looking at IoT as more than just hardware opens connectivity opportunities that had been much harder in the past.
Digital twins require connectivity to work. A digital twin without messaging is just a hollow shell, it might as well be a PDF or a JPG. But connecting all the infrastructure of the real world up to a digital twin replicates the real world in a virtual environment. Networks collect data and store it in databases all over the place, sometimes these are SQL-based such as Postgres or Oracle and other times they are simple as SQLite or flat file text files. But data should be treated as messages back and forth between clients.
