Eclipse Kapua

Eclipse Kapua is an Eclipse Foundation project that provides a comprehensive IoT platform for device management, data ingestion, and cloud integration. It serves as a bridge between edge devices and enterprise applications, offering a scalable backend infrastructure for industrial IoT deployments.

Key features

• Device management: Register, provision, and manage IoT devices at scale
• Data ingestion: Collect telemetry data from edge devices via MQTT
• User management: Multi-tenant architecture with role-based access control
• Connectivity: Native MQTT support with extensible protocol adapters
• Integration: REST APIs and message routing for enterprise integration

Architecture

Kapua follows a microservices architecture built on Java, designed for cloud-native deployments. It supports containerized deployment via Docker and Kubernetes, making it suitable for both edge and cloud installations.

Use cases

• Smart manufacturing: Connect factory floor devices to enterprise systems
• Asset tracking: Monitor and manage industrial assets across locations
• Predictive maintenance: Collect sensor data for analytics and ML pipelines
• Fleet management: Manage large-scale device deployments

Limitations

• Relatively small community (243 GitHub stars) and less active development compared to ThingsBoard or Hono
• Documentation is sparse and sometimes outdated
• Limited protocol support beyond MQTT — lacks native OPC-UA or Modbus adapters (requires Eclipse Kura at the edge)
• No built-in dashboards or visualization — requires separate tools like Grafana
• Microservices architecture adds operational overhead for small deployments

Licensing

Eclipse Public License 2.0 (EPL-2.0)