Eclipse Hono provides a cloud native device connectivity layer that can be deployed to a container orchestration platform like Kubernetes. The project has graduated from incubation in October 2019 and has since evolved into a full fledged device connectivity solution that supports connecting millions of devices using arbitrary device protocols like MQTT, HTTP, AMQP 1.0 and CoAP out of the box. Together with Eclipse Ditto and hawkBit, Hono is at the core of the Bosch IoT Suite SaaS product offering.
In June 2022 Hono 2.0.0 has been released which marks the final step of a two-year process of implementing some fundamental changes to Hono's underlying architecture. In this talk, I will provide details about how we were able to signifcantly reduce the memory footprint and start-up times of service components by migrating all of Hono's micro service components from Spring Boot to the Quarkus framework. I will share first-hand experience from this process that will help attendees adopting a similar strategy.
I will also talk about the newly added support for using Apache Kafka as an alternative to AMQP 1.0 based messaging infrastructure for brokering messages between devices and applications. I will provide background information about the motivation for this quite fundamental change and the impact it had on Hono's architecture. Based on that, I will also provide practical insight into the migration process that Bosch.IO conducted for replacing the AMQP 1.0 based messaging infrastructure with Apache Kafka in the Bosch IoT Suite.
Existing users of Eclipse Hono will learn about the new features and changes we made in Hono 2.0.0 and how they can take advantage of these in their existing setup. Solution developers will get practical advice regarding the employment of Hono in particular and using the Quarkus framework for implementing scalable, micro service based IoT solutions in general. Last but not least, attendees involved in the operating of cloud native solutions will benefit from the insights that we gained during the migration process of the Bosch IoT Suite regarding preparation, communication and the actual doing, which allowed us to perform the migration with zero downtime for customers who are relying on the system to interact with their connected devices.
