Real-time IoT Platform
A scalable infrastructure designed to handle high-frequency telemetry data, reliably serving over 500+ concurrent edge devices while maintaining extreme efficiency.
The Challenge
The core requirement was to build a system capable of achieving sub-50ms latency for device-to-cloud communication. Traditional HTTP polling was too heavy and slow for the volume of telemetry data required. The business impact relied heavily on real-time responsiveness for critical monitoring alerts.
We needed a lightweight, persistent connection protocol and a backend architecture that could process streams of data without bottlenecking during sudden spikes in device activity.
System Architecture
Edge Layer
Devices connect via MQTT over TLS. We implemented a custom keep-alive mechanism to ensure connection stability even in low-bandwidth environments.
Message Broker
A highly available Mosquitto cluster handles topic routing and message queuing, decoupling device ingress from the backend processing services.
Data Persistence
Time-series data is offloaded to a specialized database optimized for high-write throughput, allowing for efficient historical querying and visualization.
Key Results
Tech Stack Deep Dive
Node.js
Used for the core backend microservices. Its event-driven, non-blocking I/O model proved ideal for handling thousands of simultaneous connections without thread overhead.
MQTT
Chosen for its lightweight header and pub/sub architecture, drastically reducing bandwidth consumption compared to REST APIs over HTTP.
Docker
Containerization ensured environment consistency across development, staging, and production, facilitating rapid deployments and horizontal scaling.