Guest: Jonathan Beri (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: Golioth (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Golioth is a platform that offers people who build connected devices the cloud services and infrastructure they need to deploy their IoT solutions. According to Jonathan Beri, Founder and CEO of Golioth, “The problem we’re trying to solve is that hardware companies historically don’t have the expertise or the background to build performance-distributed systems. And we are trying to be the cloud for hardware companies.”

Golioth makes use of the Zephyr project, which Beri says gave them “superpowers” because it supports a lot of different devices from different manufacturers and even different architecture configurations. This gives Golioth access to over 400 devices and makes it possible for them to not only use different types of technologies but different types of storage mechanisms. Beri adds, “Our layer that sits on top of Zephyr can hook into all the APIs of Zephyr so that we can build a demo that swaps between Wi-Fi, cellular, ethernet, and even Bluetooth.”

There are many benefits of Golioth using Zephyr, such as the broad range of device support, core fundamental design decisions the developers put into the OS, the IP and networking stacks (which include interfaces to network devices such as modems and 5G radios), the heightened security and specific protocol requirements. All of this makes it possible for Golioth to hook right into the layers of Zephyr such that it can easily communicate to their backend.

As far as security is concerned, Beri jokingly says, “There’s an industry joke that the S in IoT stands for security.” Golioth takes security very seriously. To ensure the security of Zephyr-powered devices, they make use of the TLS library called Mbed TLS and tweak it in a very specific way. On the cloud side of things, they built out their own cloud solutions to enable robust end-to-end secure communication.

The summary of the show is written by Jack Wallen