So far, we have seen how to consume data and make sense of it, and how to work with manual automation using rules and schedules. In this section, we are going to look at how third-party services can integrate with our stack.

Imagine you want to have Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant as one of the interfaces to the smart devices that we built. These third-party services do not play well with our APIs directly and that is where this integration layer comes into the picture.

This is a custom layer that we will be using to write wrapper functions that act as a bridge between our API management layer and the third-party service. All this layer does is massage and accept data from Amazon Alexa APIs, and then it converts it to a format the API management layer understands; it then reads the response from the API management layer and converts it to a format Amazon Alexa API understands. This way, the core of the stack need not change for every integration with other services.

In IoT, integrating with third-party services is bound to happen at some point or another because one entity/organization cannot build everything needed for IoT.

For instance, in a smart home, you may have built a smart device that can sense the temperature along with a few other parameters. Now you want your customer/user to able to integrate their Nest thermostat with your temperature sensor values. We set up a rule to control their thermostat from our stack.

This layer makes sure that our stack is scalable and integratable with other services as well.

With this, we wrap up the section on building blocks. We have seen various layers, their components, and how all of them form a complete IoT stack when stitched together.

In the next section, we will be looking at the security aspects of IoT.