Internet of Things for Architects

MQTT publish-subscribe

While client-server architectures have been the mainstay for data center services for years, publish-subscribe models represent an alternative that is useful for IoT uses. Publish-subscribe, also known as pub/sub, is a way to decouple a client transmitting a message from another client receiving a message. Unlike a traditional client-server model, the clients are not aware of any physical identifiers such as the IP address or port. MQTT is a pub/sub architecture, but is not a message queue. Message queues by nature store messages while MQTT does not. In MQTT, if no one is subscribing (or listening) to a topic, it is simply ignored and lost. Messages queues also maintain a client-server topology where one consumer is ...