Eclipse Hono 1.0.0 Launches: Unified, Open‑Source IoT Connectivity Platform

Kai Hudalla

Kai Hudalla has been designing IoT solutions at Bosch long before the term became mainstream, covering smart home, energy management, e‑mobility, and automotive domains. As a committed contributor to several Eclipse IoT projects, he leads the Eclipse Hono initiative—an integration platform that enables millions of devices to reach the cloud effortlessly. Kai frequently presents at industry conferences and balances his technical passion with cooking and golfing whenever the weather permits.

Device connectivity is a common bottleneck for IoT developers. Heterogeneous devices typically reach the cloud via HTTP, MQTT, or CoAP, and managing each protocol separately burdens application code. From the outset, Eclipse Hono set out to remove that complexity, focusing on the data itself rather than the transport. By abstracting protocol details, Hono lets developers concentrate on the business value of their telemetry.

We are proud to announce the 1.0.0 release of Eclipse Hono, an open‑source IoT connectivity platform that offers a unified, payload‑agnostic API independent of transport protocols. Hono tackles the toughest connectivity challenges:

• Scalable, secure ingestion of telemetry data
• Command delivery to remote devices
• Device provisioning and lifecycle management
• Robust device authentication and access control

The key features of Eclipse Hono

Eclipse Hono targets organizations building proprietary IoT platforms that must support diverse device protocols and use cases. For example, Bosch IoT Suite leverages Hono to provide a seamless connectivity layer for its customers. Whether customers operate in building management, agriculture, or retail—each with distinct device manufacturers—Hono streamlines integration. We anticipate other platform builders will find similar value.

Key highlights of the 1.0.0 release include:

Scalability
Hono is delivered as a set of Dockerized microservices. Each protocol adapter scales linearly and can be orchestrated via Kubernetes or any container platform.

Multi‑tenant architecture
A single Hono deployment can host multiple IoT applications concurrently, making it ideal for cloud‑platform providers that support varied workloads.

Device authentication
Hono supports username/password, client certificates, and for CoAP, pre‑shared keys during DTLS handshakes, offering flexibility across device classes.

Device management integration
Hono exposes APIs that allow integration with existing device‑management back‑ends or the creation of new identity stores.

Monitoring and tracing
Operational teams benefit from Micrometer‑based metrics, easily exported to Prometheus or InfluxDB, and visualized in Grafana. OpenTracing instrumentation enables end‑to‑end message tracing with tools such as Jaeger.

Telemetry messaging
Hono optimizes throughput for telemetry streams, supporting both AT MOST ONCE (default) and AT LEAST ONCE delivery guarantees.

Event messaging
Event messages—used for threshold alerts, for instance—are persisted by Hono when connectivity is unreliable, ensuring that applications receive them once the connection is restored. Events are always delivered with AT LEAST ONCE semantics.

Command & control
Hono facilitates two command patterns: 1) One‑way commands that do not await a response, and 2) Request/response commands that can be blocking or asynchronous.

Multi‑cloud deployment
Deploy Hono on any public or private cloud—OpenShift, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud—or on‑premises, giving organizations maximum flexibility.

Community effort

With 27 contributors—including many from Bosch and Red Hat—Eclipse Hono exemplifies open‑source collaboration. We invite developers and enterprises to download, test, and contribute to the project. Share your feedback and help shape the future of IoT connectivity.