Industry and IoT
Device data, served to applications under the same decision.
Today Flexway serves the application side of your IoT platforms: publishing to your MQTT brokers from HTTP, streaming their flows to browsers and partners, under an AsyncAPI contract. Connecting devices directly is planned for an upcoming release.
What Flexway decides, on your infrastructure
Who calls, what Flexway decides, what is called: each route is a use case of your sector. Dashed: what is coming.
Architecture for industry and IoT: plant apps, dashboards and partners go through Flexway, on your infrastructure. Flexway publishes under contract to your broker, relays real-time streams, sends signed webhooks from the broker to partner systems and holds each caller's rate, in front of your MQTT or AMQP broker and your industrial services. A caller over its rate gets a 429. Kafka clients also plug into the gateway directly; their quotas are partly delivered.
- Plant apps
- The applications that call your APIs: each request goes through Flexway, which checks the contract and the identity before reaching your systems.
- Dashboards
- The supervision dashboards: they receive measurements as real-time streams (SSE, WebSocket), relayed without holding back.
- Partners
- The partner companies that consume your APIs: identified by a client certificate or an API key, under a quota per tenant.
- Broker events
- A broker whose messages Flexway consumes to deliver them to your partners as signed webhooks.
- Rate per caller
- A token bucket per caller limits its rate; beyond it: 429 with Retry-After and the RateLimit headers.
- Publishing under contract
- Flexway publishes on your broker, under an AsyncAPI contract and in a CloudEvents envelope, what it receives over HTTP.
- Signed webhooks
- Flexway delivers your events to your partners as signed, replayable webhooks.
- Real-time streams
- Real-time streams (SSE, WebSocket) are relayed without holding back; identity and rate are checked when they open.
- MQTT, Kafka brokers
- Your Kafka, AMQP, MQTT and NATS brokers: Flexway publishes on them under an AsyncAPI contract, in a CloudEvents envelope.
- Industrial services
- Your REST and gRPC services: they receive only the requests Flexway let through, under deadline and circuit breaker.
- Partner systems
- Your partners' systems: they receive your events as signed, replayable webhooks.
- Line: one route
- Interchange: shared decision
- Request
- Event
- Refusal
- Your infrastructure
- Rate per callertokens per caller, traces
- Publishing under contractHTTP to broker, CloudEvents
- Signed webhooksreplayable, to partners
- Real-time streamsSSE, WebSocket, unbuffered
1An application publishes a measurement
What Flexway decidesThe channel is declared in AsyncAPI; the gateway publishes to your broker in a CloudEvents envelope.
What is protectedNo open topic: the broker stays behind the gateway.
2A dashboard follows production live
What Flexway decidesThe SSE or WebSocket stream is relayed unbuffered, under the same identity decision.
What is protectedThe browser never talks to the broker.
3A partner receives the events that concern it
What Flexway decidesFrom the broker, signed, replayable webhooks deliver the partner its tenant's events.
What is protectedThe partner has no access to the broker.
Plant apps
The applications that call your APIs: each request goes through Flexway, which checks the contract and the identity before reaching your systems.
Routes through here
Dashboards
The supervision dashboards: they receive measurements as real-time streams (SSE, WebSocket), relayed without holding back.
Routes through here
Partners
The partner companies that consume your APIs: identified by a client certificate or an API key, under a quota per tenant.
Routes through here
Broker events
A broker whose messages Flexway consumes to deliver them to your partners as signed webhooks.
Routes through here
Rate per caller
A token bucket per caller limits its rate; beyond it: 429 with Retry-After and the RateLimit headers.
- Decision
- tokens per caller, traces
- Catalogue features
- Rate per caller (token bucket) ; W3C traces propagated end to end
Routes through here
Publishing under contract
Flexway publishes on your broker, under an AsyncAPI contract and in a CloudEvents envelope, what it receives over HTTP.
- Decision
- HTTP to broker, CloudEvents
- Catalogue features
- AsyncAPI as the source of the asynchronous plane ; Mediation of the synchronous to asynchronous boundary ; AMQP(S) and MQTT
Routes through here
Signed webhooks
Flexway delivers your events to your partners as signed, replayable webhooks.
- Decision
- replayable, to partners
- Catalogue features
- Signed, replayable outgoing webhooks
Routes through here
Real-time streams
Real-time streams (SSE, WebSocket) are relayed without holding back; identity and rate are checked when they open.
- Decision
- SSE, WebSocket, unbuffered
- Catalogue features
- Streams relayed without holding: SSE and chunked bodies ; WebSocket relayed
Routes through here
MQTT, Kafka brokers
Your Kafka, AMQP, MQTT and NATS brokers: Flexway publishes on them under an AsyncAPI contract, in a CloudEvents envelope.
- Catalogue features
- AMQP(S) and MQTT ; Native Kafka proxy: Kafka clients on the gateway, virtual clusters and topics per tenant
Routes through here
Industrial services
Your REST and gRPC services: they receive only the requests Flexway let through, under deadline and circuit breaker.
Routes through here
Partner systems
Your partners' systems: they receive your events as signed, replayable webhooks.
- Catalogue features
- Signed, replayable outgoing webhooks
Routes through here
What the sector requires
- MQTT · AsyncAPIDeclared channels, not open topics
- A channel exists only if the contract declares it; an application publishes over HTTP, the gateway publishes to the broker in a CloudEvents envelope.
- B2B exchangePartners without broker access
- Signed, replayable webhooks to partners; client certificates bound to a tenant for those who call.
- SupervisionReal-time streams up to the browser
- A dashboard consumes a stream over SSE or WebSocket without speaking MQTT, relayed without holding.
- LoadA rate held per caller
- Rate per caller and end-to-end traces: a chatty application does not starve the others.
What the sector expects
The expectations of your sector found in the market analysis, and where Flexway stands on each; what another component does better is stated.
| What enterprises expect | Flexway v1.6.3 |
|---|---|
| Normalise field protocols (MQTT, Sparkplug B, OPC UA PubSub)MQTT listener as a proxy, Sparkplug B, OPC UA PubSub JSON | Planned in 1.7 |
| Modbus, OPC UA client-server, BLE, proprietary protocolsThe role of a shop-floor gateway; Flexway governs what it publishes over MQTT | Left to another component |
| CoAP for constrained devicesNo CoAP listener; candidate on real demand | To be scheduled |
| Filter and aggregate telemetryTopics closed by the contract, payloads validated; stream aggregation belongs to a processing engine | Partly · next in 1.7 |
| Work offline, bufferNo central plane on the path: a local gateway decides with no network; buffering stays with the local broker; edge mode planned | Partly · next in 1.11 |
| Device identity, certificates, segmentationX.509, token, key per device, topic bound to the identity | Planned in 1.7 |
| Control downstream commandsSparkplug commands under a declared scope planned; the condition on the current state of the system: candidate | Partly · next in 1.7 |
AI at the edgeThe same arm64 binary routes to a local model; running the model stays with the inference runtime | Partly · next to be scheduled |
| Device fleet management (versions, updates)A device management platform; Flexway manages its own fleet through GitOps | Left to another component |
Upcoming releases are not commitments; "Delivered" only when the catalogue of the published release says so.
How Flexway answers
Declared channels, not open topics
- AsyncAPI as the source of the asynchronous planeDelivered · v1.5.0
- AMQP(S) and MQTTDelivered · v1.5.0
- Mediation of the synchronous to asynchronous boundaryDelivered · v1.5.0
Partners without broker access
- Signed, replayable outgoing webhooksDelivered · v1.5.0
- API keys and client mTLS as first-class identitiesDelivered · v0.1.0
Real-time streams up to the browser
- Streams relayed without holding: SSE and chunked bodiesDelivered · v0.1.0
- WebSocket relayedDelivered · v0.1.0
A rate held per caller
- Rate per caller (token bucket)Delivered · v0.1.0
- W3C traces propagated end to endDelivered · v0.1.0
State in Flexway's latest published release; a feature is marked delivered only with its release.
What Flexway does not do
- Connecting devices directly (MQTT listener with device identity, Sparkplug B, OPC UA) is not in the published release: it is planned for an upcoming one.
- Flexway is never a broker: it relies on yours.
Let's talk about your gateway
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