Background
Thred’s mission centers on meeting the specific business needs of its clients, including streamlining processes, resolving quality challenges, improving production efficiency, and identifying areas of operational loss. To address these goals, Thred’s team recognized the power of data-driven solutions and committed to developing customized tools that transform industrial data into actionable insights. These solutions took shape as dashboards, web applications, and advanced AI algorithms, designed to help businesses harness their data effectively.
Challenge While developing a new Industry 4.0 platform, Thred sought out Cedalo’s expertise. The existing platform incorporated AWS IoT Core as a foundational component, but the team was searching for an alternative MQTT broker to avoid “vendor lock-in” and allow for greater flexibility. This exploration was driven by Thred’s need for adaptability, as they were weighing whether to rely on their customers' existing infrastructure, host the solutions independently, or blend both approaches.
In selecting Cedalo’s Pro Mosquitto as the replacement, several factors played a key role. The team prioritized a solution with a proven history of market stability, rigorous testing, and solid security—a must for today’s industries, especially manufacturing. With Pro Mosquitto’s open-source roots and an impressive track record of over 600 million Docker pulls, it provided the reliable, scalable, and cloud-agnostic solution that Thred required. Additionally, Pro Mosquitto’s support for high availability (HA) suited their need for uninterrupted operations, an essential feature for a company dedicated to data integrity.
Transparency in pricing and the opportunity for direct communication with Mosquitto’s creator and Cedalo’s development team further reinforced Thred’s decision. This level of access created a foundation of trust, encouraging the potential for collaboration and innovation.
Solution
To achieve their ambitious vision, Thred implemented a shared three-node Pro Mosquitto MQTT broker HA cluster capable of handling multiple clients concurrently. This multi-tenanted HA cluster enables Thred to maintain reliable service for its diverse client base. The team explained, “Events are the raw data of a factory—any activity, whether a temperature shift, production event, or machine fault, holds potential insights. By capturing these events, our clients gain critical, actionable insights that support rapid decision-making and impactful improvements.”
The Pro Mosquitto HA cluster, deployed on Docker using Portainer and hosted on Google Cloud, is supported by a load balancer that offers both a dedicated domain and SSL termination for added security. This load balancer directs incoming data to the Mosquitto cluster, which then bridges the data to Timescale Cloud via an HTTP bridge. Thred funded the creation of this bridge feature, collaborating with Cedalo’s team to facilitate efficient data logging and storage through HTTP endpoints. For each event, Thred created “inserters,” a series of highly available HTTP endpoints that route the data to the appropriate time-series database. Situated alongside the broker, these inserters add a level of flexibility through load balancing.
Moreover, Thred actively uses the Mosquitto Management Center (MMC) to oversee its HA MQTT broker, applying access control lists (ACLs) to manage data permissions by client, role, and group. This system ensures that each customer can securely access their own data.
Results
Through their partnership with Cedalo, Thred has established a secure, dependable infrastructure built on Pro Mosquitto, which is now a vital part of their digital solutions. This setup empowers Thred to support numerous customers with operational analysis and manufacturing optimization by leveraging the Pro Mosquitto HA cluster to record production metrics. These metrics are made available to customers as a feature-as-a-service, enhancing Thred’s offerings while upholding a vision of transforming industrial data into meaningful, organization-wide insights.