With Network Load Balancer (NLB), EMQ handles concurrent connections from hundreds of millions of devices and builds a high-performance, reliable, and cost-effective enterprise-class IoT platform.
About EMQ
EMQ is a world-leading software provider of IoT data infrastructure and messaging platforms, headquartered in Shanghai. The company delivers high-performance, reliable, and secure messaging solutions for enterprises and developers.
Challenges
EMQ focuses on solving key IoT challenges: large-scale device connectivity, messaging efficiency, and data security. Its core product, EMQX, is a highly scalable and reliable open-source messaging platform that supports MQTT, CoAP, WebSocket, and other protocols to connect and manage millions of IoT devices.
Previously, EMQ relied on private protocols over TCP with TLS encryption for security. However, these protocols are incompatible with HTTPS, and traditional load balancers do not support SSL offloading over TCP. As a result, EMQ had to configure SSL offloading on backend servers, which increased O&M complexity. Concurrent connections and traffic spikes also remained a challenge.
Solution
EMQ replaced its existing load balancers and NGINX clusters with NLB, which supports SSL offloading and certificate management. By building a large-scale distributed MQTT server network on NLB for the EMQX platform, EMQ can handle up to 100,000,000 concurrent connections and improve service scalability with a single NLB instance.
Benefits
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High performance: NLB supports tens of millions of concurrent connections with high scalability.
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High reliability: NLB maintains high bandwidth capacity with built-in throttling to ensure service availability.
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Low cost: NLB uses a pay-by-LCU billing model. You pay only for the Load Balancer Capacity Units (LCUs) consumed, which prevents resource waste.