EMQX Enterprise Overview

EMQX Enterprise is a large-scale distributed MQTT messaging platform that offers "unlimited connections, seamless integration, and anywhere deployment." As a high-performance, scalable MQTT message server, EMQX Enterprise provides reliable real-time message transmission and device connectivity solutions for IoT applications. With its robust built-in rule engine and data integration capabilities, EMQX Enterprise can perform real-time data processing, transformation, and routing for massive IoT data. It seamlessly integrates IoT data with various backend databases and analytics tools, enabling enterprises to build IoT platforms and applications rapidly with leading competitiveness.

Key Benefits

• Massive Scale: Scale horizontally to 20+ nodes in a single cluster for 100M MQTT connections.
• Business-Critical Reliability: Ensure no data loss with built-in RocksDB data persistence.
• Data Security: End-to-end data encryption and fine-grained access control to protect your data.
• Multiple protocols support: MQTT, QUIC, CoAP, Stomp, LwM2M, and more
• High Performance: Ingest and process millions of MQTT messages efficiently per second per node.
• Low Latency: Guarantee sub-millisecond latency in message delivery with the soft real-time runtime.
• Complete Observability: Monitoring, alerting, and advanced end-to-end analysis with real-time MQTT tracing.

Main Components

EMQX Enterprise consists of multiple components that together build a powerful and scalable MQTT messaging platform. Here are the core components of EMQX Enterprise Edition:

Device Connectivity

EMQX Enterprise is 100% compatible with MQTT 5.0 and 3.x specifications, and its exceptional scalability allows it to easily handle a massive number of MQTT device client connections. At the same time, it provides support for other open-standard protocols, including HTTP, QUIC, and LwM2M/CoAP, enabling connectivity for a wide range of IoT devices and scenarios. EMQX Enterprise also extends its capabilities to include features like file transfer and delayed publishing, enriching its use scenarios.

MQTT over QUIC

EMQX Enterprise pioneeringly introduces the MQTT over QUIC protocol, allowing IoT clients to establish connections with EMQX via QUIC for communication. Devices using QUIC can improve connection and message throughput performance while reducing message latency. This is particularly beneficial in scenarios such as the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which commonly face weak network conditions, frequent link changes, and unstable network environments. MQTT over QUIC meets the requirements for real-time and efficient message transmission in such scenarios.

Multi-Protocol Gateways

Multi-protocol gateways enable EMQX Enterprise to support device connections using different communication protocols other than MQTT. These gateways listen to device connection requests, identify the communication protocols used by devices, and then parse the messages, commands, and data sent by devices according to the respective protocol specifications. The gateways convert this data into MQTT message formats for further message processing.

Message Routing

EMQX Enterprise provides a highly reliable message transmission mechanism through its support for the publish/subscribe pattern. This ensures that messages are reliably delivered to the intended devices or applications. With QoS mechanisms and session retention capability, data can be quickly and reliably delivered even in unstable network environments, ensuring business continuity and stability.

Distributed Clustering

EMQX Enterprise offers native clustering capabilities, enabling seamless and elastic scaling, while avoiding single points of failure. With extreme optimization, a single node can process and distribute millions of MQTT messages per second with low latency. Through cluster horizontal scaling, it supports up to 100 million concurrent MQTT connections, making it crucial for large-scale IoT deployments in areas such as the IoV, industrial automation, and smart homes.

Access Control and Data Security

Through TLS/SSL encryption and authentication/authorization mechanism EMQX Enterprise ensures the confidentiality and integrity of device data transmission.

EMQX Enterprise includes multiple client authentication mechanisms, including username/password, JWT, enhanced authentication, PSK, and X.509 certificates. It provides publish/subscribe authorization mechanisms based on ACLs. Authentication and authorization data can be integrated and managed through external enterprise security systems, such as LDAP, HTTP services, SQL, and NoSQL databases, allowing for flexible and diverse client security protection solutions.

Additionally, the Enterprise Edition offers audit logs, role and permission management, and single sign-on to meet SOC 2 compliance requirements and GDPR data privacy protection. Its comprehensive security features help enterprises build trusted IoT applications that comply with industry security standards.

Rule Engine and Data Integration

EMQX Enterprise includes a powerful rule engine that allows you to configure rules within EMQX to process and route incoming data based on your requirements. You can also use EMQX's data bridge feature to integrate EMQX Enterprise with cloud services or databases for transferring IoT data to the cloud for storage and analysis.

Real-Time Data Processing

With a built-in SQL-based rule engine, Schema Registry, message codecs, and Flow Designer, you can easily create and edit device events and message processing flows. This enables real-time extraction, validation, filtering, and transformation of IoT data.

Enterprise Data Integration

Through out-of-the-box Webhooks and data bridges, you can seamlessly integrate IoT data with over 40 cloud services and enterprise systems, including Kafka, AWS RDS, MongoDB, Oracle, SAP, and time-series databases. This empowers enterprises to effectively manage, analyze, and utilize data from IoT devices, supporting various applications and business needs.

Management and Monitoring Dashboard

EMQX Enterprise provides a graphical management system called the Dashboard, allowing you to monitor key metrics and operational statuses in real time. It simplifies the management of client connections and feature configurations. The Dashboard also enables diagnostics and debugging of client and cluster anomalies, facilitating end-to-end troubleshooting of MQTT devices online, significantly reducing troubleshooting time. In addition, it supports the integration of observability metrics into external services such as Prometheus, Datadog, and services supporting OpenTelemetry, enhancing operational monitoring capabilities.

Use Cases

EMQX Enterprise is a comprehensive IoT messaging platform that plays a crucial role in different stages of IoT device connectivity and data transmission, providing powerful functionality and flexibility for various business needs.

Based on the publish-subscribe message delivery model, it can achieve flexible message communication with millions of topics and different modes, meeting the real-time message delivery needs under various scenarios. Through its built-in rule engine and data bridge, EMQX Enterprise allows you to send messages to various cloud services, enabling seamless integration of device data with enterprise systems. It can easily support use cases such as data processing, storage, analysis, and business command issuance. Here are some typical use cases:

Bidirectional Communication

EMQX Enterprise supports connections between various devices and application endpoints, providing bidirectional communication between them. For example, in a smart home scenario, a mobile app can retrieve sensor data from various devices and send control commands to the devices when needed. This mode enables flexible one-to-one or one-to-many communication between devices and between devices and applications.

Telemetry Data Upload

EMQX Enterprise supports uploading device data to the cloud and processing and storing data from specified topics in the cloud. For example, in an industrial production scenario, EMQX can process various industrial equipment data from the factory floor in real time and store it in a database for product quality traceability and production analysis. This mode can be configured visually and leverages rich data processing capabilities for rapid development.

Large File Upload

EMQX Enterprise provides MQTT protocol file transfer capability, allowing devices to upload large file data and store it locally or in S3 storage. For example, in an IoV scenario, machine learning log files and packaged CAN Bus data can be transmitted to cloud storage to drive updates to intelligent driving algorithm models. This mode combines structured data and file-type data through a unified data channel, reducing application complexity and maintenance costs.

Cloud-Based Control Command Issuance

EMQX Enterprise allows message issuance through MQTT messages, REST APIs, and data bridges with, for example, Kafka, enabling data push or remote device control. For example, in a financial trading scenario, cloud services can push real-time data based on user watchlists in groups. This mode provides topic mapping, data processing for issuance, and data reach statistics, enabling flexible and reliable data issuance.