From 6e93d3fb6f8ac554f1e54e3ae592721fd8c85765 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Oleg Khalkov Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:55:14 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] Update doc ThingsBoard Microservices architecture - Kafka --- _includes/docs/reference/msa.md | 9 +++++++-- 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/_includes/docs/reference/msa.md b/_includes/docs/reference/msa.md index 301be26bdf..cf402c614b 100644 --- a/_includes/docs/reference/msa.md +++ b/_includes/docs/reference/msa.md @@ -96,8 +96,13 @@ The main idea is to sacrifice small performance/latency penalties in favor of pe ### Kafka -[Apache Kafka](https://kafka.apache.org/) is an open-source stream-processing software platform. ThingsBoard uses Kafka to persist incoming telemetry from HTTP/MQTT/CoAP transpots -until it is processed by the rule engine. ThingsBoard also uses Kafka for some API calls between micro-services. +[Apache Kafka](https://kafka.apache.org/) is an open-source stream-processing platform. In ThingsBoard microservices deployments, Kafka is used as an +internal message queue to buffer telemetry ingested via supported device transports (e.g., HTTP/MQTT/CoAP) until it is +processed by the Rule Engine. Kafka is also used for certain inter-service communication between microservices. + +Note: Kafka in this context is not a public ingestion endpoint. ThingsBoard Community Edition does not provide a built-in Kafka consumer +to ingest telemetry from external Kafka topics/clusters. To ingest data from external Kafka, forward it via supported ingestion +paths (device transports / REST API) or use the Kafka Integration in ThingsBoard Professional Edition or Cloud. ### Cache database