Role of an architect

The term architect is often used in technical disciplines. There are software architects, system architects, and solution architects. Even within specific domains such as computer science and software engineering, you may see people with the title SaaS architect, cloud architect, data science architect, and so on. These are individuals that are recognized experts with tangible skills and experience in a domain. These types of specialized vertical domains cross a number of horizontal technologies. In this book, we are targeting the IoT architect. This is a horizontal role, meaning it will touch a number of these domains and bring them together for a usable, secure, and scalable system. 

We will go as deep as necessary to understand an entire IoT system to bring a system together. At times, we will go into pure theory, such as information and communication theory. Other times, we will brush on topics that are on the periphery of IoT systems, or are rooted in other technologies. By reading and referencing this book, the architect will have a go-to guide on different aspects of IoT that are all needed to build a successful system. Whether you are disciplined in EE or CS, or have domain expertise in cloud architectures, this material will help you understand a holistic system—which should be, by definition, part of the role of an architect.

This book is also intended for global and mass scaling. While every topic can be used for hobbyist and maker movements, this is intended to scale to global enterprise systems on the order of thousands to millions of edge devices.