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AnvilMQ: Industrial Message Broker

AnvilMQ is EmberNet's built-in message broker, the publish and subscribe backbone that moves live data between your devices, edge applications, and the platform. It speaks MQTT, the standard for industrial IoT messaging, so the equipment and apps you already use connect to it without modification.

What it does​

  • Publish and subscribe. Producers publish to topics and consumers subscribe, which decouples sensors and PLCs from the applications that use their data.
  • MQTT on the standard port. Clients connect over MQTT on 1883, or MQTT over WebSocket on 9000.
  • The platform's data bus. EmberCORE reads AnvilMQ's current values, which is how its MQTT collector gets data from your devices.

Secure by default​

A broker shared by several organizations has to keep them apart, so AnvilMQ ships with authentication and access control switched on.

  • Every client logs in. A client without credentials can connect, but it cannot subscribe to anything or publish anything.
  • Each tenant sees its own topics. Access rules give each organization's credentials its own topic space. A tenant's credential can read and write its own Sparkplug namespace, spBv1.0/<tenant>/#, and is refused on any other tenant's.
  • Unauthorized clients are disconnected. A client that publishes where it is not allowed is dropped, not quietly ignored.

Ignition Edge and every other MQTT client need credentials to use the broker.

Running on EmberNet​

  • A platform service. AnvilMQ is not an App Store app. Fireball deploys and runs it, one broker per cluster.
  • Ports. MQTT on 1883, MQTT over WebSocket on 9000, the broker's API on 4000, and its web console on 8080.
  • Persistent users and rules. Users, access rules, retained messages, and sessions live in a database on a persistent volume, so a restart keeps them.
  • Reachable across sites. The broker is published over Flux, so sites reach it without an exposed port.
  • In EmberCORE. Engineers get a read-only view of the broker for their own organization. Admins can also manage their organization's broker users.

Using AnvilMQ​

Ask Fireball for your organization's broker credentials, point your MQTT-capable devices and apps at the broker, and publish under your own topic space. Apps deployed from the App Store, such as Node-RED, HotLoop Flow, and Telegraf, connect to it like any other MQTT client.

Next steps​