IoT at Scale: Lessons from 10,000 MQTT Messages/sec

When asked to handle 10,000 messages/sec from industrial sensors, standard approaches wouldn't cut it.

Architecture

MQTT for device communication, multi-tier processing with Kafka, TimescaleDB for time-series storage.

Result

15,000+ messages/sec with p99 latency under 500ms. Invest in monitoring early, batch your writes.