Quick question. Hopefully I'm posting this in the right place. I was curious about Ignition Cloud subscription service.
Is there a limit to the number of individual/independent MQTT devices you can bring in to the server? Is there not a limit but a point where things might somehow bog down? Whether because of tags or # of separate MQTT connections?
The MQTT functionality is provided by the third-party modules from Cirrus Link. They have different license tiers based on device count. The standard tier is up to 50 devices and the plus will do up to 250.
Ignition Software Pricing for SCADA, IIoT, MES and More (inductiveautomation.com)
MQTT Broker - MQTT Servers - Cirrus Link Solutions (cirrus-link.com)
Edit: I missed where you mentioned Ignition Cloud. I don't know anything about the cloud version.
Those device limits of 50, 250, etc are for the Cirrus Link MQTT brokers. If you use an MQTT broker independent of Ignition like Mosquitto or HiveMQ or EMQX or whatever, then the limit is whatever the computers can handle. And the beauty of MQTT is that Ignition only manages 1 connection to the broker, and the broker juggles all the independent device connections. So, the practical limit has always been higher than I expected... Like, thousands of devices on relatively light servers with 4-8GB of RAM.
Ignition Cloud Edition includes MQTT Distributor in its "standard" tier--50 client connections. Keep in mind that the number of connections originating from MQTT Transmission can vary based on how you organize your tag publishing. If misconfigured, this can create more client connections than expected. ref: How do I know how many MQTT clients are connected from MQTT Transmission - MQTT Modules for Ignition 8.x - Confluence
Interesting. Maybe I completely missed it during my initial research but I feel like that wasn't clearly advertised with the Ignition Cloud platform.
I got a random thought in my head about it the other day and wanted to make sure that there weren't going to be arbitrary limits and discovered there might be, which is frustrating.
Is there a technical reason why there would be limits on that or is it completely arbitrary and uhh.... monetary?
Not really a technical reason. Instead, it was what ended up being negotiated as the selection for MQTT Distributor within the Ignition Cloud Edition pricing model. I don't know too much more about the details behind it.
As @justin.brzozoski mentioned, you could co-host a different MQTT broker on the same VM that is running Ignition Cloud Edition--you have that flexibility.