Technology Team at Zenatix
Micro-platform
An Ecosystem Of Gateway And End Nodes
Zenatix has designed a modular gateway that works with Raspberry Pi Compute Module. The gateway can have extended functionality through the mPCIE, M.2 and IO connectors along with the 2 USB ports. Two-way communication happens with the edge middleware (written in Python) running on this gateway over OpenVPN and MQTT.
The gateway connects with wireless sensors over low power multi-hop wireless protocol OpenThread. Variety of battery-powered sensors (some of which are designed in-house while others are taken from different third parties but will still run Zenatix firmware) connect in a plug and play manner with the gateway. We have also designed an industry-first wireless IO card that is fully configurable from the cloud, to interface with diverse sensors and actuators.
More than 50k devices are deployed in the field with intelligence at all levels built-in. End node firmware is developed in C while the edge firmware is largely written as services in Python. A whole bunch of shell scripts manage the underlying hardware peripherals like network interfaces.
Embedded developers will get an opportunity to work on a state of the art wireless (and low power) embedded devices that are revolutionizing the age-old building automation industry. IoT Software Engineers will get to work on software services that run in a distributed fashion across all the 1000s of deployed gateways – think of it as 1000s of servers running your application (thus making it supercritical to ensure that it is written in a scalable manner)
Cloud
More than 200 million data points are collected every day in the cloud. Real-time data gets distributed to different services via Kafka. Real-time visualization happens through a customizable frontend, developed using technologies such as ReactJS, nodeJS and Flask and interfacing with data stored in Druid database. As a frontend developer, you will get the opportunity to create reactive applications, extend them to mobile environments as well as create no-code infrastructure that will allow drag and drop configurability of both the web widgets as well as the hardware devices deployed in the field (by non-technical people from third party partners).
Most Backend applications are built in python/Django. We also have backend apps in Node.js. As a backend developer or a full-stack developer, you will get to work on complex and scalable applications that handle millions of data points, built with a cloud-first mindset, and communicating with other services running in our architecture over APIs.
Scalable Infrastructure
All the services are dockerised and are run within a Kubernetes Cluster allowing us to adopt a multi-cloud strategy. CI/CD pipeline is in Jenkins. Sentry allows us to catch the exceptions with the monitoring and logging with Elastic, Prometheus and Grafana allow us to see the bottlenecks in scaling up. The developers, besides getting a good learning on their respective technologies, also get a very good understanding of running their applications in such a scalable environment.
Future Extensions - Where We Are Headed?
Future is going to be connected and IoT is going to play a big role in the connected future. New technologies are evolving very quickly and Zenatix always wants to be at the forefront of technology innovation. There are a huge number of directions that we are currently working on for exponential scale up in this growing market. Some of these include the following:
1. Plug and play sensing/actuation – Objective is to extend the support for sensing/ actuation devices to different wired (e.g. MBus, CAN) and wireless protocols (e.g. LoRA, BLE)
2. Mobile-first approach for easy configuration/maintenance and for real-time visualization and control configurations.
3. Scale up the stack for 100x higher data volume, moving on to appropriate technologies and databases that can support such a scale
4. Greater security across the stack together with open APIs to integrate with multiple third-party applications
5. Support new use cases for further optimization of energy consumption in built environment.
Life at Zenatix
Ishan Dhar
Sr. Engineering Manager
Being a seasoned IT professional, Ishan has witnessed several technology trends. What drives him is the desire to be ahead of these trends and do his bit in transforming the world via constant technological innovations.
Manash Deka
IoT solutions lead
Being a great place to work is the difference between a good company and a great company. Let’s hear from Manash, IoT solutions lead at Zenatix about his experience & what makes Zenatix a great place to work.
Rishi Gupta
Software lead (cloud)