ADT Pulse Smart Home Security Scalable IoT Architecture Design and Production Ops Support

ADT Inc. provides residential, small and large business electronic security, fire protection, and other related alarm monitoring services throughout the United States.

ADT Pulse is ADT’s high-end home security and home automation service used by millions of customers that combines the company's alarm and security service with home automation and live stream video.

iControl Networks (now part of Alarm.com) built and provides operational support for the software system that is the foundation of ADT Pulse. iControl engineered their application to store data in the Oracle RDBMS, which can be configured as multi-node RAC optionally running on Oracle Exadata engineered systems and can be mirrored to DR failover sites in different geographic regions.

iControl Networks also developed a version of the application that runs natively in the Cloud and can use DataStax Enterprise Cassandra as a massively-scalable and cost-effective data store for the IoT data captured by the application.

As adoption of the home security product and total data sizes grew, RhinoSource advised iControl Networks engineering and IT support teams on database scaling, performance tuning and coding best practices, enabling them to secure top cable and home security companies as customers.

To handle the product’s growing success, RhinoSource designed an Oracle Partitioning architecture for the application’s database schema for deployment on fault-tolerant Oracle RDBMS clusters to continuously support millions of US subscribers. RhinoSource created the complex automation scripts that run daily to dynamically maintain the system’s large Oracle partitions and drop expired IoT data without causing disruptions to the always-on application.

RhinoSource revamped iControl’s schema install/upgrade utility to allow ongoing schema updates for new releases of the application to be applied with the system online without the need for application downtime, which was critical for meeting strict customer SLAs.

Planning for web-scale data sizes, RhinoSource educated the iControl team on NoSQL architectures and designed a high-performance Apache Kafka and DataStax Cassandra IoT architecture for cost-effectively capturing and storing hundreds of terabytes of IoT sensor data from millions of homes. RhinoSource designed the Cassandra schema and worked with iControl’s engineering team to port the application to use Cassandra for data storage and Kafka for streaming, allowing simultaneous dual-writes to Oracle and Cassandra for Zero Downtime Data Migration.

RhinoSource developed DevOps scripting and deployed the new Cloud architecture on Amazon AWS for development, load & stress testing and production environments. Using AWS, RhinoSource conducted comparative load & stress testing to demonstrate that Cassandra-backed performance exceeded the legacy Oracle architecture, while providing linear scalability and active-active data centers at a lower price point.

RhinoSource continues to support application quality assurance and performance tuning efforts as new features are added to the iControl application and as database upgrades are released and applied at customer sites.