Creating the Connected Systems of Tomorrow in the Cloud
Autonomic was founded in 2016 in response to emerging trends in automotive technology and mobility - transformations grounded in connectivity.
We began the initial roll-out in 2019, and have been able to scale the number of supported vehicles beyond the expectations of our users. The scalability of HiveMQ has certainly helped us on our way to supporting millions of the world’s connected vehicles.
Their vision is to provide a common infrastructure that automotive OEMs can use to create the connected mobility systems of tomorrow, to generate amazing customer experiences, and to lower operational costs. In 2018, Ford Motor Company, a close partner of Autonomic, acquired the firm.
The Transportation Mobility Cloud (TMC) is an API-driven cloud platform for connected vehicles, created by Autonomic. The TMC creates a standard way of accessing connected vehicle data and sending remote commands. It also provides automotive OEMs with a common foundation on which to build smart mobility applications related to driver safety, preventive maintenance, fleet management, and more. A key component of the TMC is vehicle connectivity, which enables the bidirectional communication between vehicles and applications. For vehicles that use MQTT as a communication protocol, Autonomic has built an integrated solution based on HiveMQ.
After evaluating different MQTT options, Autonomic selected HiveMQ as their MQTT broker. The first generation of their MQTT connectivity service was based on a managed cloud MQTT solution. However, the managed solution did not meet Autonomic’s reliability and scalability needs and did not allow for the customization or extensibility that they required. For this reason, Autonomic evaluated a number of commercially available MQTT brokers, including HiveMQ.
"We are very happy with our selection of HiveMQ. The flexibility of the HiveMQ extensions system has allowed us to customize and adapt HiveMQ as needed. The HiveMQ team has been very responsive to our requirements and support requests. They have been great collaborators with our development team," says Greg Haskins, Director of Engineering at Autonomic.
In selecting HiveMQ, Autonomic is able to benefit from the following:
Flexibility. HiveMQ supports a high degree of customization and extensibility. This degree of flexibility makes it possible for Autonomic to support a variety of MQTT client configurations.
Scalability. HiveMQ can scale to support millions of simultaneous connections and can provide benchmark documentation demonstrating scalability to 10 million simultaneous connections.
Ease-of-use. HiveMQ makes it easy for developers to create a proof of concept, and this sped up adoption.
HiveMQ is based on Java, a familiar language that made it easy for developers to integrate HiveMQ into their platform.
Autonomic has successfully deployed into production their first major automotive OEM on the Transportation Mobility Cloud. Using HiveMQ, the TMC provides connectivity for millions of connected cars, handling thousands of messages per second.
Ensuring customer satisfaction with overall system performance is a top priority at Autonomic.
"We began the initial roll-out in 2019, and have been able to scale the number of supported vehicles beyond the expectations of our users. The scalability of HiveMQ has certainly helped us on our way to supporting millions of the world’s connected vehicles.”
Autonomic has made extensive use of the HiveMQ extension system, including the HiveMQ Enterprise Extension for Kafka. Autonomic forwards all MQTT messages into Kafka so the messages can be distributed to the different microservices and applications in the TMC. Autonomic has also created custom extensions to support edge cases with specific MQTT clients, to improve troubleshooting and message monitoring, and to integrate with internal authentication systems.
