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CHAPTER 4 Enabling Advanced and Modern Services 39 These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Enabling the Internet of Things No next-generation solution would be complete without support for what has emerged as a force unto itself: the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is an umbrella term for the multitude of connected, smart devices that have distributed computing power far beyond its traditional confines. It may refer to the virtual assistant device in your home, the smart thermostat on your wall, or the security cameras in your office. IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) tech- nologies often go hand-in-hand. Of course, this isn't always the case, but it's worth discussing. IoT has serious data needs. For that, you need serious capacity. Many IoT services depend on AI/ML capabilities in order to ana- lyze the mass of data that runs through IoT-centric workflows. There's simply too much data for a human to realistically ingest and derive insights from. The AI/ML-centric portions of the workflow require computing resources at the edge locations in which IoT devices often reside. AI/ML can be pretty compute-intensive, so many organizations naturally turn to the cloud to deliver the CPU cycles and stor- age capacity that's necessary to process these workloads. In these scenarios, IoT gateways become key as IoT devices direct their traffic through them, with the cloud being the ultimate analysis destination. This approach isn't always feasible. Sometimes you have too much data to push to the cloud, which would result in an unaccept- able latency period for analysis. In other cases, network latency itself can be a factor. Thus, organizations are seeking to embrace hybrid cloud services that enable some immediate processing at the edge with longer-term processing being pushed to the cloud. For immediate decisions, you allow edge services to do the work. For analysis that may take longer or that you don't need imme- diately, the workload is sent off to the stratosphere. Figure 4-1 shows how Nutanix Xi IoT enables a hybrid-cloud IoT workflow with analysis capabilities present at both the edge and in the cloud. Xi IoT delivers cloud-based services using next-generation HCI, thus providing Nutanix customers with a similar experience and operating model as their on-premises environment.