Tempestive uses Dapr and Kubernetes to track billions of messages on IoT devices while reducing costs

Tempestive is a software and consulting company specializing in manufacturing systems integration. Their product Nuboj (meaning "clouds" in Esperanto) is an IoT application for commercial IoT device management.

Challenge

Tempestive needed to transform Nuboj to address several critical issues:

• Previous microservices architecture had limited scalability and required expensive infrastructure
• Cloud-only solution couldn't meet on-premise requirements for security-conscious customers
• Difficulty scaling from few to hundreds of thousands of devices
• Inadequate development tools and high skill requirements for maintenance
• Limited modularity for diverse customer needs
• Cost inefficiency preventing competitive market positioning

Solution

Tempestive adopted Dapr and Kubernetes as their transformation foundation. Key architectural changes included:

• Publish/Subscribe API via Dapr for microservice communication
• Modular, composable architecture enabling flexible deployment options
• Support for both cloud and on-premise solutions
• Platform-independent infrastructure approach

Nuboj's architecture comprises modular microservices organized into functional modules (device structure management, real-time device status, etc.) with gRPC APIs provided by Dapr for microservice interaction and publish/subscribe message brokers (MQTT, Redis, or Kafka based on requirements).

Impact

• Cost reduction: Ability to manage substantial device counts on small on-premise servers
• Platform independence: Freedom from underlying technology constraints
• Development efficiency: Faster implementation and easier maintenance
• Language flexibility: Polyglot development supporting C#, Java, and Python for AI applications
• Security enhancement: Strengthened security measures
• Performance: Dramatically improved application responsiveness
• Market competitiveness: Significantly reduced product costs

Dapr's binding API enabled additional decoupling from underlying technologies such as databases and messaging platforms. The solution now handles billions of messages from diverse IoT devices while maintaining flexibility and cost-effectiveness.