Scaleway Elements IoT Hub

Scaleway Elements IoT Hub Overview

The Internet of Things, or in short IoT, is about creating a wide ecosystem of services for connected devices to turn them into smart devices.

Scaleway Elements IoT Hub is a PaaS fitting between connected devices and services, enabling secure device-to-device and device-to-cloud communication. Using a Publish/Subscribe architecture, the Hub ensures flexible data delivery to many destinations, including non MQTT targets such as databases, object storage, or any REST API

You can see IoT Hub as a managed message broker which main features are:

• Full MQTT compliance, secured with mTLS
• Routes to non MQTT services
• Multiple other IoT Networks such as SigFox or LoRa
• High availability and scalability

Core Concepts

MQTT: MQTT is the standard protocol used to exchange messages. It is a publisher/subscriber protocol that is very lightweight, even for the smallest micro-controllers. It works pretty much the same as a web forum: when a client publishes a message under a topic, all the clients which had subscribed to this topic get the message.

Hub: A Hub can be seen as an MQTT message broker that can be dedicated, highly-available, and scalable, and that integrates with Scaleway’s ecosystem. See IoT Hub.

Device: A Device can be seen as an MQTT client that exchanges messages with other Devices and cloud services through its Hub. It can very well be a physical device or a program. See IoT Hub Device.

Route: A Route forwards message to non Publish/Subscribe targets. See IoT Hub Route.

Network: A Network is a front door to the IoT Hub, allowing devices to exchange messages with it. See IoT Hub Network.

Kickstart: A Kickstart is a regular Scaleway instance that has been pre-populated with an MQTT-ready application (eg a Grafana that displays MQTT stats). See IoT Hub Kickstart.

IoT Hub Operation Procedures

A Hub is the central piece to which Devices can connect to exchange messages, and by which they get access to cloud services.

Under the hood, a Hub acts as an MQTT broker, meaning devices use it to publish messages on topics or subscribe to them. On top of that, Hub Routes allow Devices to benefit from Scaleway’s ecosystem.

Hubs also provide usage metrics, see this page for more information.

How to Create a Hub

In the IoT section of the side menu, click IoT Hub. If you do not have a Hub already created, the product presentation is displayed.

1 . Click Create a Hub. The creation page displays.

2 . Enter a name for your Hub:

3 . Choose the geographical region of the Hub. Currently IoT Hub is available in our Paris region, with other regions to follow:

4 . Choose a product plan for your Hub. There are currently 3 product plans for Hubs:

• Shared plan: This is a cost-effective, straightforward plan. Good for proofs-of-concept or DIY projects. The price is kept low by sharing resources between users, but for that purpose it is forbidden to use MQTT features which will require memory (no messages with QoS1, QoS2, retained or will). This plan only supports a limited number of Devices per Hub.

• Dedicated Plan: This plan offers dedicated resources for the Hub, which means more predictable performances and full support of the MQTT protocol.

• HA Plan: Not only resources are dedicated to the Hub, but they are also replicated so that the broker is highly available. This setting is ideal for workloads that require greater robustness for their Hub.

5 . Click Create a Hub or Create a Hub and Add a Device.

If you want to add directly a first device to the hub, click Create a Hub and Add a Device and continue with the documentation IoT Hub - Devices

Once the hub is created, read how to:

• Add devices to the hub
• Check IoT Hub metrics
• Interact with the Scaleway Ecosystem using IoT Hub Routes.

How to Delete a Hub

1 . From the IoT Hub section click on the IoT Hub that you want to delete.

2 . On the Hub details page, click Delete Hub:

Important: Note that this will also delete any Device added to the Hub.

3 . Confirm the deletion by typing the word DELETE in the pop-up window and confirm by clicking on Delete this Hub.

It is also possible to delete multiple Hubs at once by selecting them in the Hub list.

How to Disable/Enable a Hub

1 . From the IoT Hub section of the Scaleway console, click on the hub that you want to disable or enable.

2 . On the Hub details page, click on the Enabled/Disabled toggle.

3 . Confirm the status change in the popup window.

Important: As long as a Hub is disabled it will not be billed, but its Devices cannot connect.

IoT Hub Limitations

mqtt connections per ip address:

• Maximum number of concurrent connections: 100
• Maximum number of new connections: 20/s
• Maximum quantity of data transferred to the server: 100kB/s

This applies on all MQTT transports: mqtt, mqtts and web sockets (ws and wss). Connections above the limit will be refused.

mqtt messages payload:

MQTT messages payload is limited to 4MiB maximum.

Hub reserved memory:

The total memory reserved per Hub to store the retained, inflight and will messages currently is 140MiB.

Note: Only Dedicated and HA Hubs can be used to send retained messages. Please see the Shared Hub documentation for more information.

IoT Hub product plans:

IoT Hub Events

You can get your Hub Events (including errors, activity reports, events, …) through MQTT, as explained here: IoT Hub events.

Going Further

• API Documentation

• Scaleway IoT Hub FAQ