Differences between Enterprise instance types and features

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IoT Platform provides Standard, Premium, and MQTT types of Enterprise instances. This topic describes each instance type to help you select the one that best suits your business requirements.

Background information

  • For information about how to use IoT Platform instances, see Overview of instances.

  • For information about the regions where IoT Platform is available, see Supported regions.

  • For information about the features of IoT Platform, see Features.

Enterprise instance types

Type

Description

References

Standard

This instance supports the basic services of an Enterprise instance, such as device connection, message communication, device management, and O&M.

  • Supports 1,000 to 200,000 device connections. To connect more than 200,000 devices, select a Premium instance.

  • If you need more services, enable them as required.

Features

Premium

This instance provides dedicated resources at the device connection layer. It uses independent servers to process device connections. This ensures that device connections are not affected by the online or offline status of devices or the message forwarding volume of other instances, which improves connection stability.

Integrated features are as follows:

  • Supports 10,000 to 5,000,000 device connections.

  • Supports custom domain names and CA certificates for device connection.

    If you connect devices from other vendors to IoT Platform, those vendors will not be aware that you are using Alibaba Cloud IoT Platform.

  • Provides a cloud gateway to quickly connect devices that use the China Telecom NB-IoT, open source MQTT, JT/T 808, GB/T 32960, or SL 651 protocol.

  • Premium instances in the China (Shanghai) region are integrated with the Link WAN service to support devices that use the LoRaWAN protocol.

    Alibaba Cloud Link WAN is a network management platform for Internet of Things (IoT) enterprises. It helps developers build enterprise-level IoT networks that support large capacity and high concurrency. Devices managed by Link WAN are LoRa devices.

MQTT Type

MQTT Enterprise instances support only MQTT connections. They use custom usernames and passwords for device authentication and custom topics for uplink and downlink communication.

The default Service-Level Agreement (SLA) for this instance is Standard. It supports 1,000 to 200,000 concurrent online devices. You cannot scale out the instance to support more devices or upgrade it to a Standard or Premium Enterprise instance.

Important

If your Alibaba Cloud account already has an MQTT Enterprise instance, you can continue to use it. If not, you cannot purchase a new MQTT Enterprise instance.

Username and password authentication

Feature comparison between Enterprise instance types

Feature

Standard

Premium

Connection protocols

MQTT, CoAP, HTTPS, and Cloud-to-cloud connection.

Custom protocols

Not supported.

Supported.

Cloud gateway

Not supported.

Supported.

Custom domain name

Not supported.

Supported.

Device security

Supports device-specific secrets, product-specific secrets, and ID²-based authentication.

Supports device-specific secrets, product-specific secrets, ID²-based authentication, and X.509 certificate-based device verification.

Nearby connection

Supported.

Device distribution

Supported.

Thing Specification Language model

Supported.

Device management

Supports up to 200,000 devices. Scale-out is not supported, but migration is supported.

Supports up to 5,000,000 devices. Scale-out and migration are supported.

Server-side subscription

Supported.

Push message type: The message types that IoT Platform supports.

Data forwarding (new version)

Supports JavaScript-like scripts to process data from device topics.

Data forwarding destinations: Data can be forwarded to destinations supported by IoT Platform. For more information, see Data forwarding destination examples.

Data forwarding (old version)

Supports SQL statements to process data from device topics.

Data forwarding destinations: You can forward data to destinations supported by IoT Platform. For more information, see Examples of data forwarding destinations.

DataService Studio

Supported.

  • All features of DataService Studio are available for Standard and Premium instances only in the China (Shanghai), China (Beijing), China (Shenzhen), Singapore, and US (Virginia) regions.

  • Only the time series storage feature of DataService Studio is available in the Japan (Tokyo), Germany (Frankfurt), and US (Silicon Valley) regions.

Monitoring and Alerts

In addition to viewing basic monitoring data, you can create custom monitoring dashboards (including metrics for devices, messages, Thing Specification Language (TSL) models, data forwarding, and over-the-air (OTA) updates) and configure threshold-based alert rules.

Device O&M

Supports O&M statistics, device diagnostics, online debugging, Simple Log Service, message trace, Remote Configuration, device jobs, OTA updates, secure tunnels, remote logon, and event response.

Cloud APIs

Supported.

Value-added services

Supports the IoT Digital Twin Engine service.

Isolation

Logically isolated.

Resource isolation at the connection layer.

SLA

Supported:

  • Standard (99.95% SLA): Default.

  • High availability (99.99% SLA).

High availability (99.99% SLA).

References

Related questions

  • For answers to frequently asked questions about the Alibaba Cloud IoT Platform service, see FAQ about IoT Platform.

  • For answers to frequently asked questions about billing for IoT Platform services and instances, see Billing FAQ for IoT Platform.

  • For answers to frequently asked questions about selecting and using IoT Platform instances to manage devices and related services, see FAQ about IoT Platform instances.