Eclipse Hono Launches MongoDB‑Based Device Registry – Scalable, Production‑Ready

Eclipse Hono, as described on its official site, is an IoT connectivity platform that offers a unified API for connecting thousands of devices to back‑end services, regardless of the protocols they use. It supports AMQP, CoAP, HTTP, and MQTT out of the box. The platform is built from microservices, packaged as Docker containers, and deployed in Kubernetes or similar orchestrators.

One core component is the device registry, which stores tenants, devices, and credentials. Protocol adapters consult the registry to confirm that a tenant and device are registered and enabled, and they authenticate devices before accepting telemetry, events, or command responses. The registry also exposes HTTP APIs for managing this data.

Prior to Hono 1.3.0, the only built‑in registry was file‑based, suitable for demos but not for production because it cannot scale horizontally. Users had to implement their own registry for real deployments. With the 1.3.0 release, that barrier is gone.

MongoDB‑Based Device Registry

Hono now includes a production‑grade registry that persists data in MongoDB. Tenants, devices, and credentials are stored in separate collections, allowing the database’s native sharding and horizontal scaling capabilities to be leveraged automatically. This makes the registry easy to scale as device counts grow.

HTTP endpoints of the MongoDB registry can be secured with basic authentication. Clients must supply a username and password to manage resources. Toggle this feature via the configuration property hono.registry.http.authenticationRequired (set to true or false). For full configuration details, see the MongoDB Device Registry configuration guide.

Deploying Hono with the MongoDB Registry Using Helm

The Eclipse IoT Packages repository hosts Helm charts for installing Hono on Kubernetes. By default, the chart deploys the file‑based registry. The steps below show how to install Hono with the MongoDB registry.

1. Add the Eclipse IoT chart repository:

   $ helm repo add eclipse-iot https://eclipse.org/packages/charts

2. Install Hono with the MongoDB registry into the hono namespace:

   $ helm install \
     --set deviceRegistryExample.type=mongodb \
     --set mongodb.createInstance=true \
     --dependency-update \
     -n hono eclipse-hono eclipse-iot/hono

3. The deviceRegistryExample.type=mongodb flag selects the MongoDB implementation instead of the default file‑based one.
4. Setting mongodb.createInstance=true (the default false) tells the chart to deploy a new MongoDB instance as a separate microservice. If you already have a MongoDB deployment, set this to false and provide the connection details:

   mongodb:
     host:   # Hostname or IP of your MongoDB instance
     port:   # Listening port
     dbName: # Database name for the device registry
     username: # Optional authentication username
     password: # Optional authentication password

5. After installation, verify the deployment using the instructions in the Helm chart’s README.

With these steps, Hono is ready to manage devices at scale using a robust MongoDB backend.