Managed ELK deployments at the Edge with OpenStack and IoTronic: an italian Smart City case study

The huge growth in terms of the number of distributed devices connected to the Internet, the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), has led to the expansion of their domain of applicability by enabling advanced and futuristic environments such as the Smart City-like scenarios. In such a use case, a pressing need emerges to cope with the complexity and heterogeneity of the infrastructure by reusing as much tooling as possible without resorting to vertical ad-hoc solutions. Furthermore, having good decision support based on the colossal amount of data (i.e., Big Data) generated by these environments is absolutely critical to make them smart. In fact, the impediment to the smart city concept is to provide efficient aiding decisions whilst using a malleable solutions to meet the information technology evolution. In this context, we introduce in this paper our system for IoT infrastructure management and Big Data processing. In particular, our IoT infrastructure manager middleware Stack4Things (S4T) is integrated with the Elastic Stack (ELK) data management solution. This work thus describes the rationale, efforts, and results so far achieved, for an integration of the IoT paradigm with a Cloud-oriented environment focusing on a Smart City scenario, and featuring data collection and visualization as example use cases of such integration.