I have helped more than 100 customers build new and innovative services for their customers with the help of IoT technology. With this slides, I share the lessons learned working with these customers as they start a journey into improved digitalization. My focus is on IT operations and project management.

1. IoT in Production
Lessons learned in 5+ years of supporting
Enterprise MQTT Deployments
Florian Raschbichler | Head of Support @ HiveMQ

2. Introduction
• HiveMQ Head of Support
• 5 years of experience with MQTT
• IoT operations consulting
• 120+ customers guided to production
Florian
Raschbichler
@fraschbi
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3. Agenda • What is MQTT?
• An IoT Use Case
• Organisational Hurdles
• Testing IoT Deployments
• Debugging
• IT Security
• Networking
• Conclusion
• Q & A
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de-facto standard for IoT
Eclipse Foundation IoT survey
Protocol Usage
• 2018
• MQTT 62%
• HTTP 54%
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2012-01-01%202019-02-28&q=mqtt,amqp,xmpp,coap

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Pub/Sub
• lightweight protocol on top of TCP/IP
• Pub/Sub pattern
• de-coupling of sender and receiver
• central component: the broker
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6. IoT Use Case
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7. !7

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Connected Cars
* https://automotive-institute.kpmg.de/2018/brain.html#automotive-key-trends
• “Hello World” IoT Use Case
• Bi-directional communication
• Unreliable networks
• Decent computing power
• Connectivity and Digitalisation #2 importance
• Car OEMs technological inventors
• UX improved with IoT technologies
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9. Operational Hurdles

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Multiple Teams / Vendors
Challenge SolutionPitfall
Communication
Accountability
Synchronisation
Friction loss
Blame game
Resource blockage
Operational points of
contacts
Single overall ownership
Coordinate capacities
early
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Adaption to IoT
Challenge SolutionPitfall
New technologies
Long term projects
Unknown territory
No knowledge transfer
Lack of foresight
Technical one way
streets
Hire experts
Architectural
investments
Chose supported
software
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12. Testing IoT Deployments

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Challenge SolutionPitfall
Scalability Testing
Resiliency Testing
Performance Testing
Individual components Always test entire system
End-to-end considerations
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Challenge SolutionPitfall
Project Staging
Complex use cases
Devices and software
Networking
Lab testing software
Static sprint cycles
Use actual devices
Live networking systems
Consider hardware dev
cycles
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15. Debugging IoT Deployments

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Challenge SolutionPitfall
Black Boxes
Huge amounts of
messages
Data protection laws
Distributed Systems
Unknown technologies
‘Mute’ Components
No knowledge transfer
Hasty conclusions
Gather metrics
Meaningful Dashboard
Centralised Logging
Always to RCAs
Verbose early stages
Get your Ops up to speed
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17. IoT Security

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• Secure the application
• Security on network level - VPN
• Security on transport level - using TLS/SSL
• Security on application level
• Secure your deployment
Security Layer
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19. Security on Transport level
using TLS/SSL
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TLS provides:
Encryption
Authentication
Data Integrity
When TLS is used correctly, a third-party observer
can only infer the
- connection endpoints,
- type of encryption, as well as the frequency and
- an approximate amount of data sent,
but cannot read or modify any of the actual data.

20. Authentication • Proof of identity
• Protocol features may not be
sufficient
• x509 Client Certificates
• Existing infrastructure
• LDAP
• OAuth 2.0
• …
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21. Authorization • Permissions for clients
• Actions
• QoS Levels
• Topic Filters
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Security on Application Level
Advanced
Authentication
Mechanisms with
extension, that provides
an Authenticator via a
Security Service

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Best practises
23
Infrastructure
Only expected traffic gets forwarded to downstream systems
UDP - not used by MQTT - can be blocked
Allow only traffic to ports, needed for your MQTT system (1883, 8883)
Operating System
Use SELinux, keep libraries and software updated
MQTT Broker
Use TLS
Use Authentication & Authorization, separate topic namespaces
Throttling your MQTT clients to prevent overload
Configure message size to maximum of your use case (max 256MB)

24. Networking considerations

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Challenge SolutionPitfall
TCP Timeouts
Multiple Components
Billions of Devices
Various Layers
Timeouts
NATing Firewalls
QoS=0
Scalability
Resilience
Synchronise Heartbeats
Live Testing
Create detailed overview
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28. Conclusion

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1
2
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IoT is ready for production
Acquire knowledge and expertise
Invest early into an wholesome approach

30. Q & A
Time for Questions

31. Thank you
for your attention