Case Study: EMQ powers scalable IoT data processing with StreamNative's Apache Pulsar

EMQ - Customer Case Study

EMQ, an open-source software company in the IoT industry, launched ActorCloud to provide device access, message flow management, data parsing, and data processing for connected devices. As usage grew, ActorCloud needed a highly available, distributed, and scalable messaging platform to handle large volumes of device data, support horizontal scaling, and simplify development and operations. StreamNative’s Apache Pulsar technology was chosen to meet these requirements.

With StreamNative and Apache Pulsar, ActorCloud built a streaming architecture using Pulsar Functions, window functions, and Pulsar IO connectors to ingest data from EMQ X Brokers, process it in real time, and send results to external systems such as email, databases, and EMQ X topics. EMQ also used Pulsar’s shared subscriptions, retention policies, and Presto SQL integration for real-time and historical analytics. The case study highlights Pulsar’s high throughput of up to 1.8M messages per second per partition and says it helped EMQ develop ActorCloud faster while enabling horizontal expansion of device access and data processing.

EMQ