Astarte provides a scalable, reliable and secure mechanism for ingesting data from IoT devices natively. It provides a lightweight layer on top of common protocols (the default and most popular one being MQTT) which has native semantics for Interfaces and Astarte concepts. It also implements state of the art security, by using Mutual SSL Authentication by default with CA automation and Out of Band certificate exchange.

When connecting a new device from scratch, Astarte Transports provide all features and additional perks needed for a modern IoT connectivity solution, and are usually the best possible choice when adding software components to your devices is possible.

In cases where your data is coming from a device with its own protocol, or you need to integrate devices or data sources coming from higher level providers (e.g.: you need to feed into Astarte devices connecting to another IoT platform or IoT broker), Astarte Streams allows seamless integration with the rest of Astarte. You can define Interfaces just like you would do with a Native implementation, and write declaratively a conversion logic for most common / standard protocols. And, for corner cases, you can code the whole ingestion logic yourself.

Astarte stores all of its data in a Cassandra-compatible data store, but this might have some shortcomings when we’re talking about massive datasets which have to be kept around for very long periods of time. Especially for data which has to be archived after a while, Astarte implements an automated and configurabile mechanism for Data Expiration in Cassandra and Cold Storage support.

In interfaces, you can define for how long data should be kept around and accessible through Astarte. After the retention expires, Cassandra’s TTL kicks in, and Astarte can be configured to export data which is about to expire and transfer it to a cold storage, such as an S3 bucket or Hadoop. This keeps the cluster tidy, and saves big on Cassandra storage, compute power and maintenance.