Featured on Unplugged — An IIoT Podcast
The open publish/subscribe standard that connects the plant floor to the enterprise and the cloud — built by the team that pioneered MQTT infrastructure for industrial IoT.
Visit Cirrus Link →Why this matters to our community
If you work in industrial automation, you have a connectivity problem: getting reliable, secure, real-time data off the plant floor and into the systems that need it — without brittle polling, proprietary protocols, or vendor lock-in.
Cirrus Link solved that problem by co-authoring MQTT and Sparkplug — the open specification that brought a lightweight, report-by-exception, publish/subscribe model to industrial data. It's now the connective tissue for a huge share of modern IIoT architectures, and it's exactly the OT/IT crossover the Unplugged community lives in.
The products, explained
Cirrus Link builds on Inductive Automation's Ignition platform. MQTT Engine, MQTT Transmission and MQTT Distributor are Ignition modules — they install into an Ignition gateway and run inside it. Chariot is Cirrus Link's standalone MQTT broker: it runs on its own, with no Ignition required.
Cirrus Link's standalone MQTT broker, Sparkplug B aware. Chariot runs independently of Ignition — deploy it on-premise or in the cloud as the message bus for your architecture. It is Cirrus Link's only standalone product.
Brings MQTT and Sparkplug B data natively into Ignition — auto-discovering tags from edge devices publishing to the broker, with no manual mapping. Installs as a module in an Ignition gateway.
Publishes Ignition tag data to any MQTT broker using the Sparkplug B specification — report-by-exception, stateful, and efficient over constrained or intermittent links. Installs as a module in an Ignition gateway.
MQTT Distributor runs an MQTT server inside Ignition, so a gateway can act as its own Sparkplug B broker. The Cloud Injector modules stream that data natively into AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Both install as modules in an Ignition gateway.
Proof points
Cirrus Link's Ignition modules and the standalone Chariot broker are the reference implementation for MQTT and Sparkplug in industrial automation — powering report-by-exception data pipelines from the edge to the enterprise across manufacturing, energy, oil & gas, and utilities.
Cirrus Link on Unplugged IIoT
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