Eclipse IoT: A Unified, Open-Source Package for Rapid IoT Development

Kai Hudalla

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Kai Hudalla has been at Bosch developing IoT solutions for smart homes, energy management, e‑mobility, and automotive long before the term became mainstream. A core contributor to several Eclipse IoT projects, including Eclipse Hono, he champions an open‑source integration platform that can connect millions of devices to the cloud. He frequently speaks at industry conferences and enjoys cooking and golfing when the weather permits.

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Connecting devices, managing digital twins, and orchestrating software updates are the three pillars most vendors address in proprietary IoT offerings. Yet many organizations prefer not to lock themselves into a single vendor or a closed platform. They often need to embed IoT cloud services within their own data centers. Open‑source solutions are the most flexible way to meet those requirements.

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While Eclipse IoT projects already provide the necessary capabilities—device connectivity, digital twin management, and software rollout—each component operates independently. Integrating them demands significant effort, creating a steep learning curve.

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To solve this, we are assembling a pre‑integrated, coherent package that bundles Eclipse Hono, Eclipse Ditto, and Eclipse hawkBit. By delivering a ready‑to‑use, pre‑configured bundle, developers can focus on application logic rather than plumbing the individual projects together, lowering the barrier to entry and accelerating deployment for common IoT scenarios.

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An integrated IoT package

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The objective is to provide a cloud‑native IoT stack built on Eclipse Hono, Eclipse Ditto, and Eclipse hawkBit, deployable on Kubernetes environments.

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Eclipse Hono: Unified device connectivity

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Eclipse Hono offers a robust, protocol‑agnostic interface for connecting millions of devices to back‑end services. It natively supports HTTP, MQTT, and AMQP, and exposes APIs for key IoT communication patterns: telemetry and event reporting, as well as command & control for device actions.

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Thomas Jäckle

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Thomas Jäckle has been a software developer at Bosch since 2010. Since 2015 he has led the Bosch IoT Things cloud service, and since 2017 he serves as committer and project lead for Eclipse Ditto. A bachelor’s in computer science and a master’s in application architecture from Hochschule Furtwangen University, he is passionate about software craftsmanship and continuous learning.

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Eclipse Ditto: Digital twin management

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Eclipse Ditto unifies IoT devices and their digital twins, providing state management, metadata search, and a bridge between physical devices and applications. It supports AMQP 1.0, AMQP 0.9.1, MQTT, Apache Kafka, and HTTP/WebSockets.

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Eclipse hawkBit: Software update orchestration

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Eclipse hawkBit is a domain‑independent back‑end that deploys firmware and application updates to edge devices and gateways over IP. It enables secure, up‑to‑date systems and opens new revenue models, such as feature‑extension monetization.

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The high‑level architecture of the pre‑integrated IoT package consisting of Eclipse Hono, Eclipse Ditto, and Eclipse hawkBit.

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High‑level architecture of the IoT package

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Jeroen Laverman

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Jeroen Laverman has been with Bosch since 2015, starting in device abstraction and semantics before moving into software updates. In 2018 he became product owner of Bosch IoT Rollouts and project lead of Eclipse hawkBit. He holds a bachelor’s in computer engineering from Hochschule Furtwangen University and a master’s in information science from Pforzheim University Business School.

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Eclipse Hono includes a set of protocol adapters that allow devices to connect using MQTT, HTTP, AMQP, and CoAP. Devices can upload telemetry and events, which Hono forwards via its north‑bound AMQP 1.0 APIs. Applications use these APIs to send commands and receive responses. The package also incorporates a production‑ready device registry, managing identities and credentials, and employs enMasse for scalable message routing and brokering.

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Eclipse Ditto leverages Hono’s north‑bound API, processing telemetry, events, and commands. It presents devices as digital twins that reflect the last known state reported through Hono. Applications can interact directly with devices via Hono or query twin state through the twin API. Notification of state changes is available over AMQP 1.0, AMQP 0.9.1, MQTT, Apache Kafka, or HTTP.

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Eclipse hawkBit activates when firmware or application updates are required. IoT applications communicate with hawkBit via its RESTful management API. hawkBit uses Ditto as its device inventory, enabling filtering and grouping based on stored properties and state. This supports structured update flows, cascaded deployment groups, and emergency shutdowns when error thresholds are breached.

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Who is working on this IoT Package?

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Red Hat and Bosch already deploy and contribute to Eclipse Hono, sharing a common goal of enhancing developer experience with Eclipse IoT technologies. We are actively driving the development of this cloud stack package and invite collaborators who wish to run Hono, Ditto, and hawkBit on their own infrastructure.

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Interested parties can reach out by email or GitHub. The IoT cloud package will be developed under the Eclipse IoT Packages project, which focuses on integrating existing Eclipse IoT projects. It will provide deployment instructions and Helm charts for deploying these packages on Kubernetes platforms.