IBM Watson IoT Platform: Message Gateway and MessageSight are nearing end-of-support - What next?
IBM Watson IoT Platform – Message Gateway and MessageSight are going end-of-support in a little over 4 months. Are you all set with an alternative?
Recently, a large electronics company with 600,000 monitored devices deployed in the field reached out to us. They were worried about what their world will look like after September 30th, 2022 when support for IBM IoT MessageSight and the IBM Watson Message Gateway will be discontinued.
Since many businesses are working their way out of this situation, this blog post explains the perfect alternative: HiveMQ. We surmise your priority to make sure HiveMQ (at a minimum) has feature parity with what your current (and soon to be EOS solution) can do.
We reviewed publicly available documentation and created a summary list of key features that an enterprise is likely to use.
| IoT Message Gateway/MessageSight 5.0 features | HiveMQ equivalent |
|---|---|
| Both publish and subscribe (topic-based) and point-to-point (queue-based) messaging domains. | HiveMQ is a PubSub-architecture MQTT broker that can extend to work with message queues and ESBs. You can use our pre-built extensions or build custom extensions with our enterprise SDK. HiveMQ professional services team can review and approve your custom extension to assure performance. |
| MQTT versions 3.0, 3.1, and 5.0 | Yes. Full support including 3.1.1 |
| Both persistent and nonpersistent qualities of service. | Yes. |
| MQTT over HTML5 WebSockets | Yes. |
| Java Messaging Service (JMS) 1.1 | HiveMQ is an MQTT broker. |
| Message expiry | Yes. |
| Message discard | Yes. |
| MQTT shared subscriptions | Yes. |
| Clusters for scalability | HiveMQ uses a masterless cluster architecture that provides scalability and high availability. Adding new nodes increases the system throughput to multiple hundreds of thousands of messages per second. The HA approach with internal data replication enables you to perform fail-over in case of hardware or software failures without message loss. Furthermore, this also enables you to perform rolling updates of a cluster with no downtime and message loss. |
| Restful administration API | HiveMQ gives the possibility to manage key aspects of the broker (e.g. client connections) both via our portal named Control Center and via REST APIs for a programmatic approach. |
Developer-friendly APIs and libraries
|
MQTT is standardized on the protocol level and therefore MQTT standard-compliant brokers like HiveMQ work flawlessly with all standard-compliant MQTT libraries provided in many programming languages including Java, C, C++, C# and many more. HiveMQ provides an extensive overview of all available libraries. |
Reliability
|
HiveMQ ensures the delivery of messages and also supports all QoS levels defined by the MQTT specification (0,1 and2). It’s crucial to note that many ESBs and hyperscalers do not comply with the QoS values defined by the specification and can not support features like “exactly once” delivery. The risk in using such a product is that some of your applications will have to be re-engineered to parse for duplicates. Also, HiveMQ provides out-of-the-box integrations into Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Splunk, and JMX-based integrations into other Observability tools such as Datadog. The HiveMQ logging system provides support for log rotation, purging and Syslog integration capabilities for offloading. |
Security
|
HiveMQ delivers: Authentication via Username and password with support for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers and databases as user data sources. Using the Enterprise Security Extension, you can create custom authentication logic that lets you chain multiple modes of authentication. In addition, HiveMQ offers overload protection and throttling mechanisms to provide robustness in case of large (re)connect scenarios. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Level Security (TLS) support (SSL v3 and TLS 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3). Fine-grained messaging authorization policies on all MQTT interactions, which restrict access that is based on combinations:
OAuth 2.0 support to delegate authentication to a remote server, securely. Web Portal Single sign-on support via OAuth 2.0. |
Integration
Simplified deployment
|
HiveMQ
Deployment ease:
|
In Conclusion
For enterprises looking to migrate away from the IBM IoT MessageSight / IBM Watson (Message Gateway) solution, HiveMQ is a straightforward choice. While your priority at the moment is to find a system that offers parity and ease of migration, this is also an excellent opportunity to evaluate products which can adapt to your future needs. In addition, a cloud-native solution that doesn’t lock you in gives you the ability to be agile. HiveMQ offers an easy immediate solution and will be a long-term partner for your IoT data movement requirements.
We are ready and eager to discuss how you can evaluate and implement HiveMQ as a replacement for IBM IoT MessageSight. Reach out to discuss how we can help.
About Gaurav Suman
Gaurav is the Director of Product Marketing at HiveMQ. He is an engineer by education, and is passionate about helping businesses thrive with the help of technology.
Contact Gaurav
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