Introduction
The nRF Cloud Device Management services provide all necessary capabilities for Nordic customers to manage fleet of their devices throughout their lifetimes. With protocol agnostic transport protocols, which include CoAP, MQTT and REST API, customers can choose which protocol best suits their application.
The nRF Cloud Device Management provides capabilities for the following aspects of IoT device management:
- Devices Information: All necessary details about devices being deployed, performing, updated and operating are important part of the device management operation.
- Device Provisioning: Connecting devices securely to cloud with credentials, unique identifiers and establishing trust and authentication mechanisms.
- Monitoring Devices: Once devices are deployed, monitoring their status and performance is crucial for lifetime operations.
- Updating Devices: Devices should have ability to be updated whenever there is a need to update software on those. Software can be application, modem or some other part of the devices software stack.
- Data from and to Devices: IoT devices should be communicated with cloud also when it comes to data. Sensor type of data from devices to cloud or control data from cloud to devices.
- Lifetime Operations: Devices must be controlled from the cloud in any phase of their lifecycle – deployment, operation, firmware maintenance/updates and retirement.
The nRF Cloud Device Management services provide scalable solution for all these main challenges, making it easy to get started with and work on while devices are operating out there. The core features of nRF Cloud Device Management are as follows:
- Secure device connection
- Device provisioning
- Firmware-over-the-Air (FOTA) update capability
- Alerts from devices to cloud
- Monitoring features
- Message and Data storage
Key features
Firmware Over-The-Air updates
Firmware Over-The-Air (FOTA) updates offer customers a secure and failsafe firmware update to connected IoT devices. Security is increased by keeping the firmware update security separate from the transport protocol used. The update metadata (i.e. manifest) is signed for authenticity and integrity.
In addition to application-level FOTA, customers are also able to do multi-level FOTA of the app, middleware, and/or modem firmware.
The process of updating one or multiple devices is straightforward. You first create an update package and then you can use that package to update one device or a group of devices. You can set up different roll-out procedures and policies. Once the update has started, you can easily monitor the update and fetch relevant statistics. We have separated/independent update file servers to keep runtime high.
