What’s New in HiveMQ 4.26?

The HiveMQ team is proud to announce the release of HiveMQ Enterprise MQTT Platform 4.26. This release focuses on new capabilities in our HiveMQ Enterprise Extension for Kafka and HiveMQ Enterprise Data Lake Extension as well as stability and operability enhancements for your HiveMQ broker deployments.

Highlights

• Microsoft Entra ID authentication support in the HiveMQ Enterprise Extension for Kafka
• Azure Blob Storage support in the HiveMQ Enterprise Data Lake Extension

HiveMQ Enterprise Extension for Kafka adds support for authentication with Microsoft Entra ID

HiveMQ 4.26 introduces a new authentication mechanism in the HiveMQ Enterprise Extension for Kafka. This new authentication option delegates authentication and authorization to Microsoft Entra ID and lets you create passwordless connections to Azure services such as Azure Event Hubs via the Azure Event Hubs Kafka API.

How it works

When you enable the Microsoft Entra ID authentication mechanism, the HiveMQ Enterprise Extension for Kafka iterates over several authentication methods to connect to your Azure Event Hubs instance.

The three principal authentication methods Microsoft Entra ID supports for Azure Event Hubs for Kafka are:

• Environment (for example, a service principal with secret)
• Workload Identity (for example, a HiveMQ cluster running on Azure Kubernetes Service)
• Managed Identity (for example, a HiveMQ cluster running on virtual machines in Azure)

Since each method requires a different configuration on Azure, it is important to set up the right permissions before you use this authentication mechanism. For more information, see Passwordless connections with Azure Event Hubs for Kafka.

Example Microsoft Entra ID authentication configuration:

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<kafka-clusters>
    <kafka-cluster>
            <id>cluster01</id>
            <bootstrap-servers>EVENT-HUB-NAMESPACE.servicebus.windows.net:9093</bootstrap-servers>
            <authentication>
                <microsoft-entra-id/>
            </authentication>
    </kafka-cluster>
</kafka-clusters>

How it helps

Microsoft Entra ID authentication enables passwordless connections and removes the need to store credentials in the HiveMQ Enterprise Extension for Kafka when connecting to Azure Event Hubs Kafka API.

Additionally, Microsoft Entra ID authentication enables the use of Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) to grant permissions to Azure Event Hubs. For more information, see Authorize access to Event Hubs resources using Microsoft Entra ID.

HiveMQ Enterprise Data Lake Extension adds Azure Blob Storage support

Starting with HiveMQ 4.26, the HiveMQ Enterprise Data Lake Extension expands your ability to utilize different cloud object storage solutions. Now, in addition to the existing mqtt-to-s3-route that allows the extension to connect and upload to Amazon Web Services’ Simple Storage Service (S3), our new mqtt-to-azure-blob-storage-route gives you the option to connect and upload Apache Parquet files to Microsoft’s Azure Blob Storage service.

How it works

The new configuration option lets you define as many connections and routes to Azure Blob Storage as your individual use case requires. Based on your configuration, the HiveMQ Enterprise Data Lake Extension efficiently forwards MQTT messages to one or more Azure Blob Storage containers via your HiveMQ broker.

Example MQTT to Azure Blob Storage connection and route:

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<azure-blob-storage-connections>
    <azure-blob-storage-connection>
        <id>my-abs-connection-id</id>
        <authentication>
            <connection-string>DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=my-account;AccountKey=my-key;EndpointSuffix=core.windows.net</connection-string>
        </authentication>
    </azure-blob-storage-connection>
</azure-blob-storage-connections>

<mqtt-to-azure-blob-storage-routes>
    <mqtt-to-azure-blob-storage-route>
        <id>my-abs-route</id>
        <mqtt-topic-filters>
           <mqtt-topic-filter>#</mqtt-topic-filter>
        </mqtt-topic-filters>
        <azure-blob-storage-connection-id>my-abs-connection-id</azure-blob-storage-connection-id>
        <container>my-container</container>
        <processor>
            <parquet>
                <columns>
                    <column>
                        <name>topic</name>
                        <value>mqtt-topic</value>
                    </column>
                    <column>
                        <name>payload</name>
                        <value>mqtt-payload</value>
                    </column>
                <columns>
            </parquet>
        </processor>
    </mqtt-to-azure-blob-storage-route>
</mqtt-to-azure-blob-storage-routes>

For more configuration details, see our full HiveMQ Enterprise Data Lake Extension documentation.

How it helps

The HiveMQ Enterprise Data Lake Extension enables the smooth and efficient transfer of IoT data to your cloud-based data lake solution. By expanding the cloud storage options to include Azure Blob Storage we enable simple integrations for customers that use Azure-based data lake services. The additional option to forward data to Azure Blob Storage also enables multi-cloud use cases across Azure and AWS.

Data lakes typically store data in its native format and can process any amount or variety of data. This helps organizations to integrate and analyze data from different parts of the business.

More Noteworthy Features and Improvements

HiveMQ Enterprise MQTT Broker

• Fixed an issue that could increase replication time due to incorrect bundling of messages during a cluster topology change.
• Fixed an issue that could prevent subsequent nodes from joining a cluster after a node with an incompatible version unsuccessfully attempts to merge with the cluster.
• Fixed an issue that could negatively impact cluster stability during parallel joining or merging of nodes in certain edge use cases.
• Removed an irrelevant Physical address missing log message to prevent unnecessary log file clutter.

HiveMQ Data Hub

• Temporarily disabled Arm64 Linux support in the transformation feature to resolve sporadic instabilities.

HiveMQ MQTT CLI

• Fixed an issue that prevented the correct processing of pending queued messages when a persistent session resumes.

HiveMQ Enterprise Distributed Tracing Extension

• Updated span exporter options to reflect the deprecation of Jaeger’s native clients in favor of the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP).

Get Started Today

To upgrade to HiveMQ 4.26 from a previous HiveMQ version, take a look at our HiveMQ Upgrade Guide.
To learn more about our enhanced rolling upgrade policy, see Introducing Flexible MQTT Platform Upgrades with HiveMQ.
For details on all the features we offer, explore the HiveMQ User Guide.

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