08/06/2022, 12:11 Event Driven Microservices Architecture for IoT Solutions Using MQTT

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Written by Kudzai Manditereza MQTT 5 Essentials

Category:
IoT • MQTT
Published: December 14, 2021

Introduction: IoT Event Driven Microservices

Architecture Using MQTT Protocol

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In this article, I’ll discuss an event-driven microservices architecture

approach for IoT using MQTT with HiveMQ MQTT Broker as the central
messaging component.

Here’s the reason why: Internet of Things (IoT) may be a planned priority
for many organisations, but an overwhelming majority of IoT projects fail.
In fact, a 2017 report by Cisco put this number at 74%. While there may
be multiple reasons why IoT projects fail, it mostly comes down to
companies underestimating the complexity of the mix of communication
and computing technologies required to build a well-functioning IoT
solution.

With so many moving parts, the lack of a well-thought-out IoT solution

architecture could cause your project to fail to deliver on expected value.
And this failure can occur at any stage, from project inception to
execution and maintenance. Building an architectural foundation that
enables the development of a real-time, responsive, scalable, extensible,
and maintainable system is critical for the success of an IoT project. An
event-driven microservices architecture approach using MQTT protocol is
the way forward.

This is how it works!

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Microservices Architectural Approach

A more traditional approach to build an IoT solution, or any software
system for that matter, is to build an application in which the user
interface, business logic, and database are combined into a single
program residing on a single server.

While this approach may work in some cases, it has proven to be

insufficient when it comes to building complex software systems such as
a fully functional IoT solution. Mainly because it is difficult to scale and
maintain, and when one part fails, the entire set of services goes down.

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On the other hand, a Microservices Architectural Approach allows you to

break down your IoT application and build it as a collection of granular
functional services, with each service running in its own processes and
communicating through APIs, as shown in the diagram below.

This approach increases flexibility, for example, the ability to update the
code of a single function without having to redeploy the rest of the
microservices architecture.

What’s more is that these collections of microservices can combine into

large macro services, providing an even greater ability to quickly update

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the code of a single function in an overall service or larger end-user

application.

The independent deployability of microservices also allows you to extend

the functionality of your IoT application by simply adding more services
to the system with no downtime, at scale.

Let’s consider, for example, the design of an IoT-based Asset

Management system that is responsible for Remote Asset Monitoring,
Asset Health Analysis, Generating Work Orders, and Scheduling
Maintenance Checks. The system is cloud-based and incorporates IoT
devices for its functions. And there are many client applications to this
system, for administration staff, engineers, maintenance staff, and
external clients.

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This IoT system would be broken down into a set of services to serve
each of its business functions. A Remote Asset Monitoring microservice,
an Asset Health Analysis microservice, a Work Order Generation
microservice, and a Maintenance Checks Scheduling microservice.

Additionally, microservices architectures have come into use along with

Docker containers, allowing the code for each function (microservice) of
your IoT solution to be deployed as a standalone software package that
includes everything needed to run it. And that software package can exist
anywhere in the public cloud or on-premise.

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That means the failure points of your IoT system components are more
independent of each other. Essentially, isolating the surface area of
failure and creating a more stable overall application architecture.

This greatly accelerates software development time while making it easy

to maintain, upgrade, and scale your IoT application.

So, for this example, you are writing your four new applications to serve
your business functions in the microservices kind of style, and have them
communicate with your existing IT systems using APIs.

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Now, here’s the thing. The Internet of Things is a multi-level ecosystem,

where devices equipped with sensors and embedded software collect
telemetry data, transfer the data to an on-premise or cloud-based server,
and therefore there is a lot of message exchange going on between IoT
devices, microservices, existing IT systems and extra IoT layers that
include databases, analytics solutions, visualisation dashboards, and
mobile applications.

This calls for a well-thought-out messaging model on top of the

Microservice architecture. This leads us to the topic of the Event-Driven
Messaging Model.

Message Driven vs Event-Driven (Asynchronous

Messaging in IoT)
Let’s take, for example, an Asset Health Analysis microservice that needs
to notify the system when it detects an anomaly in the vibration telemetry
data from a piece of equipment. Using a Message-Driven approach, IoT
system components that are interested in knowing the equipment’s
health status would have to repeatedly send a request to check if an
anomaly condition has been raised. Simply stated, Message-Driven
systems are based on synchronous request-response where you ask for

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something, and then you wait until you get your response back. In a
nutshell, each of your IoT components poll each other for data in timed
intervals, await messages, and react to them, HTTP works like that.

Now, imagine a system that is event-based, and everything is based on

Action and Reaction, instead of the issuing of requests. As opposed to
data being sent to a specific IoT component that is asking for it, in Event-
Driven communication, data is emitted as an Event from an IoT
component for anyone listening to consume. In other words, each IoT
solution component produces items of data with a fixed sender and
shares them with any consumer.
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In this way, the system has a source of intelligence and is aware of

everything that happens without having to continuously ask for it.

In reference to our earlier example, if the Asset Health Analysis service

detects an anomaly in the vibration telemetry data, it gives out this
information as an event without concern of who’s consuming it.
Consequently, that same event could trigger a Work Order Generation
service to generate a work order. And when the service is finished
generating the order, it could produce an event back into the system for
any other component that might be interested in that event, which makes
it a responsive interaction.
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Basic Concepts of Event-Driven Messaging Pattern

The first and most important component in an event-driven system is the
Event. An event in an Event-Based system is a message that represents
facts(data) or commands and is created when a change of an observed
value happens, such as an action by a user, an increase or decrease of
something, a condition that becomes true e.t.c. This message or event is
generated or captured by what is referred to as an Event Generator which
is an entity that detects the change and notifies the system.

The event generator could be a sensor, monitoring system or middleware,

etc. A common design pattern that is used to implement this process is
the Publish/Subscribe pattern. In this case, an event generator is called a
publisher, and interested parties are called subscribers, or event handlers.

MQTT Broker for Event Delivery and Management

Now, the thing is, if you want to reliably pass events in your IoT solution
then of course you need a messaging infrastructure that supports that.

MQTT is one of the most widely adopted IoT communication protocols

that support an event-driven architecture, and it is based on the
Publish/Subscribe pattern of communication using an MQTT Broker for

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coordinating the delivery of events. An MQTT broker would receive events

from a producer and forward them to correspondent subscribers.

Any component can be an event producer, it could be an IoT device, Web

app, or Mobile app e.t.c. And they are producing events into your system,
while the MQTT Broker sits at the middle of your IoT Solution,
instantaneous capturing facts and forwarding the information to
interested parties, as events. This pattern provides a way of wiring
together your IoT components whereby, messages are exchanged via a
given information channel or topic.

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When the broker receives a published message, it broadcasts it to all

subscribers but only those who have subscribed to the given information
channel can receive it. By avoiding direct communication between the
publisher and the consumer, a highly efficient fan-out messaging pattern
is created as there is no pausing to wait for any response to the
generated messages.

Think about it, an IoT solution architecture that is highly scalable, even
10,000 components can subscribe to consume an event, and it wouldn’t
affect how that event is produced.

As discussed earlier, the flexibility of integrating new functionalities is the

primary feature to be considered during the design of your IoT solution
cloud architecture. You may expand functionality by creating
microservices for other business functions and simply plugging them
onto the MQTT network.

Even better, for industrial applications you may want to take advantage of
MQTT Sparkplug, an interoperability framework build on top of MQTT
allowing events that use a standardised topic namespace, payload
definition, and state management to be emitted from your IoT
components as a single source of truth.

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HiveMQ provides an MQTT broker and a client-based messaging platform

designed for the fast, efficient and reliable movement of data to and from
connected IoT devices and systems. It uses the MQTT protocol for
instant, bi-directional messaging between your IoT device and enterprise
systems. Further, because the MQTT protocol is so lightweight it can
deployed on platforms with constrained resources as is typical of IoT
devices. And it doesn’t end there, MQTT has security enabled so it works
with TLS and common authentication protocols.

The enterprise version of the HiveMQTT broker is designed for horizontal

scalability and the best-in-class throughput. In fact, we conducted a
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benchmark showing the connection of 10,000,000 real MQTT clients,

which exchange more than 3 billion messages per hour.

Now, in our example scenario, your Asset Health Analysis microservice or

other backend application might generate an “Anomaly Detected” Event
and publish it to the MQTT broker under a specific topic, and because
other microservices such as the Work Order Generation microservice is
subscribed to that event topic through the same broker when it also
receives the event, it will perform necessary operations and publish the
new event under a different topic when finished.

But of course event-driven is not the answer to everything, Microservices

also need data from each other and other backend systems. For example,
the order Work Order Generation microservice might need additional
details such as location, skills requirements, and tools needed from a
system’s database. And for that you’d need to introduce an API interface
to your IoT solution architecture as depicted below.

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Conclusion: Adopt MQTT for IoT Event Driven

Microservices Architecture
In conclusion, the event-driven architecture is a complementary solution
for microservices and other types of architectural patterns. When
combined with a reliable messaging infrastructure such as HiveMQ
MQTT Broker, it enables you to build simple, resilient, maintainable,
extensible and self-aware IoT Solutions.

Further, MQTT Quality of Service (QOS)-Level 2, which ensures the

delivery of important messages exactly once, can be applied in a
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microservices pattern called SAGA. SAGA is used for transactional

messaging across different services with separate databases.

About Kudzai Manditereza

Kudzai is Technology Communicator and Founder at
Industry40.tv. He is currently involved in four efforts:
Industry4.0 Research, Educational Videos, Podcast
Host, and IIoT Systems Integration. He has a
background in Embedded Systems Design, Software
Engineering, and Industrial Automation.

IoT @AWS re:Invent 2021: The Hotel California Effect

Using MQTT and Raspberry Pi to Visualize Sensor Data on a TilesFX Dashboard

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