Extending factory edge data to the cloud with MQTT enabled AWS IoT SiteWise gateways

We are excited to announce the general availability of MQTT enabled SiteWise Edge gateways for AWS IoT SiteWise. Bringing this functionality into AWS IoT SiteWise Edge allows you to develop a unified approach to data management that is essential for quick decision-making and continuous process optimization across the organization.

Most factories today contain a mix of legacy and new automation equipment from multiple vendors supporting software applications ranging in age from a few years to potentially a few decades old. These machines and applications often communicate with hundreds of different machine protocols generating multiple operational data telemetry streams of operating parameters like pressure, temperature, speed, machine state, and more. There are also factory data streams from software systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Machine Execution System (MES) and shift scheduling systems that coordinate production processes, equipment, and labor. While data exists in the equipment, in the production software systems, and in IT systems, the challenge is how to integrate and expose this knowledge to enable rapid responses to changing conditions while storing detailed information for longer term historical analysis and process optimization.

MQTT and Unified Name Space (UNS) provide a standardized approach to organize and structure metadata across the enterprise. By implementing MQTT and UNS, manufacturers create a consistent data foundation to extract, transform, and load that data for analysis. This helps bridge legacy systems with modern applications, enabling both real-time operational visibility and long-term historical analysis.

Industrial IoT with AWS

AWS provides a variety of specialized services enabling innovation and solutions across a wide range of industries such as manufacturing, automotive, and healthcare. AWS IoT services help you accelerate innovation in a secure manner from edge to cloud both easily and at scale.

AWS IoT SiteWise is a purpose-built, managed IoT service that makes it easy to collect, store, organize and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale to help you make better, data-driven decisions. AWS IoT SiteWise helps efficiently gather data from a wide array of industrial equipment and processes, model this data to accurately represent their assets and facilities, process and analyze information in real-time, visualize operations through intuitive built-in tools, and integrate with other AWS services for advanced analytics and machine learning applications.

AWS IoT SiteWise Edge extends AWS IoT SiteWise cloud capabilities to the edge enabling you to collect, process, organize, and act on industrial equipment data on-premises while delivering that data securely to AWS IoT SiteWise in the cloud. To expand our capabilities and simplify the customer journey, we collaborate with AWS Partners on console and platform integrations to support hundreds of protocols and development of user defined calculations, alarms, events and edge processing. Some of our key partnerships include Siemens Industrial Edge, Domatica EasyEdge, Litmus Edge, and Belden CloudRail.

The new MQTT enabled AWS IoT SiteWise Edge gateways continue our edge evolution by enabling a publish and subscribe data topology (pub-sub) and a hub and spoke integration methodology between software components at the edge. Before this release, our internal edge software components and any custom-made edge components required point to point integration using AWS proprietary APIs and software. The pub-sub and hub and spoke concepts use the open source MQTT standard for data transport simplifying integrations between existing equipment, middleware, and production systems without the need to learn proprietary APIs or to have deep programming skills. This allows users to organize data in the way that best suits their needs.

Democratizing data at the edge and delivering to the cloud

MQTT helps establish a logical data hierarchy that mirrors their operational structure through an intuitive, folder-like organization. This creates a unified namespace where production data, machine telemetry data, and system information are organized in a way that reflects how your factory actually operates and reports. The AWS IoT SiteWise Edge gateway serves as the hub, collecting data through native OPC UA connectivity, certified partner integrations, and your custom edge integrations. As data flows through this MQTT-based architecture, it maintains its contextual relationships while enabling real-time access across operations.

The system combines machine telemetry with metadata from production systems like MES and ERP, creating enriched data streams that provide deeper operational insights. As your data travels to the cloud through AWS IoT SiteWise Edge, built-in store-and-forward capabilities support near-zero data loss, even during network interruptions. AWS IoT SiteWise enables you to reflect your edge data structure in the cloud through modeling, where it becomes a powerful asset, readily available for advanced analytics through AWS’s comprehensive suite of services, from AI/ML capabilities to data lake solutions. This approach transforms raw industrial data into actionable insights while maintaining its organizational context from the shop floor to the cloud.

Building a Unified Name Space: Foundation of Industrial Data Integration

The industrial sector has embraced the Unified Name Space (UNS) as a transformative approach to data management, offering a standardized methodology for integrating, organizing, and normalizing operational data. This data architecture pattern creates a dynamic data fabric that begins where your data originates—at the edge of your network—and extends across your entire industrial operation-all the way to the AWS cloud.

At its heart, UNS mirrors the natural organization of your facility through an intuitive, hierarchical topic structure. Much like a familiar file system, this structure creates logical pathways that make data discovery and access straightforward users. The real power of UNS lies in its event-driven nature: after data is published to a topic, it becomes instantly available to all subscribed systems, enabling real-time decision-making across your operation.

Unlike traditional data architectures that focus on storage, UNS functions as a lightweight, dynamic data bus. It maintains current values and relationships without the overhead of historical storage, optimizing both network and system resources. This efficiency is further enhanced by UNS’s technology-agnostic design, which accommodates multiple protocols and transport mechanisms, bridging the gap between legacy systems and modern applications.

AWS IoT SiteWise Edge now brings this architecture within reach through two flexible implementation paths. You can either establish your UNS directly using its built-in MQTT broker or use MQTTv5 broker-to-broker bridging to integrate with your existing MQTT infrastructure. Whether you’re building a new unified namespace or expanding an existing one, AWS IoT SiteWise Edge provides the robust foundation needed for data integration from the edge to the cloud.

Conclusion

MQTT enabled AWS IoT SiteWise gateways simplify the edge integration of operational data along with equipment telemetry to produce actionable insights. Building a UNS on top of MQTT allows you to capture and reflect the physical organization of equipment and processes. With AWS IoT SiteWise, users can store that data structure and analyze the data while maintaining the context between different data streams. This enables data use for other downstream applications from AI/ML to data lakes in AWS cloud.

To learn more about this new feature, visit the AWS IoT SiteWise documentation and the Code sample showing MQTT-enabled Sitewise gateway together with SFC.