4. United Manufacturing Hub

This section explains the reasons why the United Manufacturing Hub is build like it is

The United Manufacturing Hub combines all previously mentioned best-practices.

Open-Source

It is Open-Source and is therefore vendor neutral.

Best-practice tools

It leverages strongly the Open-Source ecosystem like Node-RED and Grafana.

But it also connects to common commercial solutions, like for example Tulip

Microservices architecture

It bundles all these tools together in a flexible microservice architecture using Docker, Kubernetes and Helm. It is basically a Helm Chart.

Unified Namespace (MQTT) + Apache Kafka

The United Manufacturing Hub is a Unified Namespace, where you can push data in from various systems and share it across applications.

It leverages MQTT and additionally Apache Kafka for reliable data processing. The reasons behind this trade-off can be found in the blog article: Tools & Techniques for scalable data processing in Industrial IoT.

Reliable data storage

The main database is TimescaleDB as it combines a relational with a time-series database. The reasons for TimescaleDB compared to InfluxDB can be found in our blog article: Why we chose timescaleDB over InfluxDB.

Last modified February 17, 2023: update (#208) (ea731fc)