Posted On: Apr 11, 2023

Amazon IoT Core, a managed cloud service that lets customers connect millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and routes trillions of messages to Amazon Web Services services, announces support for Shared Subscriptions to its MQTT-based messaging broker service. MQTT is a device-to-device messaging communication standard widely used in IoT applications for device to cloud message delivery. Amazon IoT Core supports both MQTT3.1.1 and the newer MQTT5 industry specifications allowing clients with either version to take advantage of this new feature seamlessly.

Using Shared subscriptions, MQTT3 or MQTT5 clients can distribute a large volume of inbound messages to a group of subscribers for processing messages in a more efficient manner. This is achieved by delivering each message randomly to one of the subscribers, thus spreading the message processing load across a larger set of processors. 

In addition, Amazon IoT is also enabling new CloudWatch metrics to help with observability of messages queued for persistent sessions in the MQTT broker. New metrics will indicate Success, ServerError, or Throttling of queued messages. These new metrics will simplify the debugging of any persistent message deliveries.

To get started and to learn more about MQTT5 features supported by us, refer to the technical documentation.

MQTT with Shared Subscriptions support using Amazon IoT Core is now available in all Commercial regions, including the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.