Edge Application Components

The following diagram depicts the core components available for applications in Edge and how they interact with each other over the Edge Broker.

Figure 1. Edge Application Components

Edge Application Concepts

  • All applications are deployed as Docker containers.
  • Any development language can be used so long as it can
    • be deployed as a Docker container in a Linux environment;
    • communicate to MQTT. Most modern languages you would consider have MQTT libraries.
  • Each application communicates with other applications by publishing and subscribing to messages on the Edge Broker.

For example:

  1. The OPC-UA Protocol Adapter is configured to retrieve tag data and publish it to the broker on a topic named opcua_data.

  2. Your custom app running as a container subscribes to the opcua_data topic, manipulates the data in some way and publishes the results back to the broker on the topic timeseries_data.

  3. The Time Series Cloud Gateway application subscribes to the timeseries_data topic and sends the data to Time Series.

You can use the same “pub/sub” data flow to route data to other applications such as Event Hub Cloud Gateway, Historian, or other custom applications.

For more information on the applications provided with Edge, refer to: