In industry-based settings, we will often encounter scenarios where we must figure out the best solutions when it comes to edge cases. Edge cases, in this context, are cases where certain circumstances out of your control may occur, and you will need to account for this despite having no historical event of a similar occurrence which you can learn from.
In this section, we will discuss how to account for this with complex environments, understand the key factors to consider in such environments, and look at a case study to see how such factors are considered within a real industry-based scenario.
Understanding the fundamental rules of architecting for different areas
First, let’s look at three key factors that often lead to uncovering edge cases when architecting within the different environments around us.
Environment
In our deployment, it is crucial to understand where we are putting the equipment with the protocol. Are we putting it in an area that may be prone to signal interference? Is it an area that experiences many floods? These are all considerations that are not part of historical data that we may have but are important to consider as they could happen. It will impact the protocols we decide to use.
Industry
When operating deployments, we also need to understand what is going on within the industry that we are in. Have there been more security breaches within our industry? How likely is it that a certain connectivity protocol that we are using will be breached over the coming months or even years? No matter the size of the company, security breaches or industry-wide issues have a fair chance of happening, and if we are to prevent issues such as those from occurring, we should always have a holistic view of what to keep on the horizon and address.
The standards
Of course, we must always consider edge cases based on the standards. What are the chances that the manufacturer’s specified maximum temperature the sensor can withstand would be experienced by the device over a lengthy period? Can it withstand that continuous temperature? There are always considerations to be made regarding this, and this risk also must be accounted for.
Now that we’ve looked at some guidelines for identifying edge cases, let’s look at a case study based on a water utility IoT network.
