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Version: 5.6

Cloud / IoT

The plug-ins in this section connect the OPC Router to cloud, messaging, and IoT systems. You use these plug-ins when data from machines, plants, or applications needs to be sent to or received from external platforms.

Selecting the right plug-in does not primarily require in-depth IoT expertise, but rather an understanding of how the target system provides or expects data: as a message stream, via a web API, or through a data platform.

Typical Use Cases​

  • Transferring machine and process data to cloud or IoT platforms
  • Receiving events, commands, or messages from external systems
  • Exchanging data with web APIs
  • Providing operational data to analytics and reporting platforms

Overview​

  • Apache Kafka: For distributed, event-driven data streams with high data volumes.
  • MQTT: For lightweight publish/subscribe communication with devices, gateways, and IoT brokers.
  • REST: For data exchange via HTTP- and HTTPS-based interfaces, both as a client and as a server.
  • Snowflake: For bidirectional data exchange with the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, such as writing operational data for further analysis or reading data for feedback and follow-up processes.
  • Sparkplug: For standardized MQTT-based IIoT communication with a predefined structure for device and status data.

Selection Guide​

  • Use MQTT if a broker is the central communication component and devices or applications publish and subscribe to messages.
  • Use Sparkplug if, in addition to MQTT, standardized modeling of nodes, devices, and states is required.
  • Use REST if the target system provides HTTP or HTTPS endpoints or if the OPC Router itself is to offer an HTTP or HTTPS interface.
  • Use Apache Kafka if data is processed as a scalable event stream in distributed systems.
  • Use Snowflake if data is to be written to or read from Snowflake in a structured manner, for example for analytics, reporting, or feeding cloud results back into operational processes.