As we have seen saw in Chapter 1, Introduction to IoT, there are plenty of pieces that go into an IoT stack. Building all of them and managing them in real time is a huge, daunting, time- and money-consuming task.
This is where the ready-made IoT platforms play an important role.
In a nutshell, IoT platforms are support software that connect smart devices and the entities that use the data from these smart devices (such as humans, other systems, and so on).
IoT platforms are also known as the IoT middleware, as these are the middleman between the data collected on the edge and the user-facing application.
A typical IoT platform will have the following layers, as we have seen in Chapter 1, Introduction to IoT:
