Lexmark’s Optra Edge platform processes 2M daily IoT messages using Fauna

Lexmark is a $3.7B provider of cloud-enabled imaging and IoT technologies that offers a diverse portfolio of products across printers, imaging products, and software solutions. Optra Edge is a Lexmark product that combines IoT devices in the field with powerful artificial intelligence software to offer data-driven, real-time business insights and recommendations for manufacturing, retail, and transportation clients.

This case study unfolds how Lexmark’s Optra Edge business requirements mandated a transactional database with a dynamic data model, API-based connectivity with a serverless operational model, and multi-region architecture -- and why Fauna was ultimately selected.

IoT application architectures can vary greatly depending on their specific use case, functionality, and data transactionality requirements. Unlike traditional software applications, IoT applications need to accommodate another layer of management and connectivity at the device or sensor level - which can introduce complexity in delivering the application without complicated stitching or maintenance.

Optra Edge supports a variety of industry verticals and IoT use cases, which means it needs to accommodate many data types. For example, Optra Edge serves companies in the transportation industry optimize parking-lot operations by counting vehicles using on-board machine learning algorithms that identify vehicles and render utilization in real-time, but also helps retail customers in tracking foot traffic quality.

Optra Edge selected serverless cloud compute functions and sought a database that could integrate with a serverless HTTP interface without having to manage connection pools. In addition to the delivery model, the Lexmark team didn’t want to allocate development time to the undifferentiated database management and scaling activities associated with legacy databases.

Optra Edge processes millions of daily messages with variable usage and is used by enterprise customers across the globe, so the compute platform and database would need to be able to support peak times without incurring latency, scale down on demand, offer enterprise-grade security, and be available across geographic regions (ideally, without having to configure the database to accommodate such patterns).

A key piece of Optra Edge’s value proposition is transforming raw data into actionable insights, so the transactional capabilities of the architecture were critical. Processing and serving the data in a strongly consistent manner was also important to ensure customers accessed accurate data.

Lexmark Optra Edge ultimately turned to Fauna for their database needs because it offered a flexible and powerful data model, a fully serverless database delivered as an API with zero operations, and a scalable multi-region architecture that could handle the massive amount of data generated by their IoT devices without manual intervention.

Key reasons why Fauna was selected over alternatives like MongoDB and DynamoDB included:

Fauna stores data as documents — which means it can accommodate the unstructured and semi-structured data generated by Optra Edge’s IoT devices, but its powerful document-relational data model also incorporates the relational power (joins, schema enforcement, foreign keys, strong consistency, etc.) of a traditional RDBMS. Developers using Fauna can write application-native code in a familiar, modern coding style within a transaction context.

By leveraging the Fauna Query Language (FQL), the Optra Edge development team could integrate their IoT fleet management software to perform a query and inject the results in Fauna all as one single transaction. A single request can encapsulate a transaction that spans multiple records, and the operation can be transmitted and executed atomically by the database. Further, database requests can be parameterized as functions, similar to stored procedures in a traditional SQL system, so that logic can be abstracted from applications that are difficult to upgrade in place. With Fauna, you can benefit from this native functionality without being constrained by the rigidity of a relational model.

One of Fauna's key advantages when used as an IoT database is its API connectivity, which more naturally fits with broader API-based tooling leveraged in IoT applications compared to legacy databases. In the case of Optra Edge, Fauna’s HTTP interface enables stateless connectivity without connection pools, keeping the application lightweight and efficient, while minimizing latency and maximizing throughput.

The Lexmark team was laser-focused on delivering the best possible end-user experience and didn’t want to spend time focused on undifferentiated database operations. Fauna's truly serverless model allows the team to focus on delivering a first-class customer experience, instead of database sharding, capacity planning, cluster management, or other maintenance tasks.

Fauna’s native distributed transaction engine delivers global availability, replication, ACID-compliance, and distribution by-default, which allows Lexmark to deploy Optra Edge in multiple regions around the world without requiring IT operations staff involvement. Fauna offers multiple region group options (as well as custom regions through its dedicated offering, Virtual Private Fauna); all databases created are immediately replicated across three geographic regions with multi-active reads and writes. Fauna’s geographically distributed storage also ensures low latency local access and data resilience. This is critical for Optra Edge, which collects data from devices in various locations and processes it in real-time for enterprise clients.

Finally, Fauna's security features helped Lexmark ensure the confidentiality and integrity of their customer's data. Fauna is Soc 2 Type 2 certified and offers full data encryption at rest, and its Region Group concept ensures data residency compliance with regulations like GDPR. Meanwhile, Fauna’s fine-grained attribute-based access control enables highly specific and dynamic access control policies based on attributes of the user, the data they are accessing, and the context of the access request.

Fauna’s comprehensive set of features has allowed Lexmark to deploy Optra Edge with minimal IT operations staff involvement, ultimately streamlining operational workflows and overhead, enhancing customer experiences, and enabling the team to focus on continued IoT fleet management innovation that drives the business forward.

If you’re interested in learning how Fauna can support your application, check out the Fauna docs, sign up for a free trial, and set up a demo with one of our experts.