Powering Smart Manufacturing at the Edge

From developers to manufacturing managers, Synadia, powered by NATS, provides real-time connectivity – across multi-cloud, edge and on-premises deployments – for distributed communication patterns and AI-ready apps critical to decentralized manufacturing processes and global supply chains.

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Synadia
Remote Commands
Telemetry
$ nats stream ls
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How Synadia Helps

Synadia is enabling a new era in manufacturing – automated, resilient and intelligent. Synadia technology accelerates time-sensitive, AI-powered alerting, scales across devices and locations for coordinating complex workflows and maintains operations with data processing at the edge despite intermittent network connectivity.

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Manufacturing Customers

Ensuring business agility with rapid decision-making and remediation based on critical data and time-sensitive issue alerting across geo-distributed locations.

Production Managers

Enabling real-time and resilient communication of critical, system-wide performance data to develop sustainable production practices, maintain schedules and control costs.

Maintenance and Quality Managers

Powering predictive maintenance systems with streamed sensor data and proactive identification of issues to minimize downtime and ensure quality control.

Architects

Designing a lightweight, event-driven architecture with real-time connectivity between multi-site manufacturing systems and support for edge-native and AI-ready applications despite harsh conditions and intermittent connections.

Developers

Streamlining distributed application development, with a cloud-to-edge native dev platform, managed self-hosted support, SDKs in multiple languages, real-time diagnostics and debugging and NATS JetStream persistence for critical event replay across locations.

Operators

Resolving remote issues and deploying systems and upgrades rapidly for multi-factory maintenance and performance, utilizing remote data syncs, real-time alerts and remote expert remediation to avoid or stop escalations.

"Intelecy’s no-code AI platform relies on the robust performance of Synadia Cloud. to deliver real-time machine learning insights that optimize industrial processes, making it indispensable for our operations at the edge."
Jonathan Camp
Jonathan CampChief Security Officer, Intelecy

See how Synadia enables innovation in smart manufacturing

MachineMetrics: Industrial IoT & Predictive Analytics with NATS

Explore how MachineMetrics uses NATS for edge computing and predictive analytics in industrial IoT, enabling real-time insights and resilient architecture.
MachineMetrics: Industrial IoT & Predictive Analytics with NATS

Case Study: Synadia + Intelecy

With Core NATS and JetStream, Intelecy created an edge-aware application with ML and persistence running on its connected systems including low-resource processors running on factory machinery and sensors.
Case Study: Synadia + Intelecy

Intermittent Connectivity? Low-resource environment? No Problem

Read the manifesto to find out how Synadia is redefining distributed systems for edge and AI-native apps. With NATS as the connective fabric, say goodbye to complex federated architectures.
Intermittent Connectivity? Low-resource environment? No Problem

Today’s manufacturing is AI-powered insights from edge to cloud and cloud to edge

Synadia leads this modernization, enabling seamless connectivity and AI applications at the edge for optimal performance, updating and alerting. As the manufacturing industry evolves, Synadia's technology is crucial for these smart technologies, controlling costs and enhancing safety.

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Smart Manufacturing
Synadia provides the connectivity fabric enabling delivery of AI-powered insights despite edge conditions in factories.
Optimized Operations
Synadia delivers, in milliseconds, the real-time data necessary for manufacturing operations and maintains communication channels despite high loads or offline nodes, thus ensuring production performance and continuity.
Device Scalability
Synadia’s lightweight footprint supports scalability across diverse IoT devices and systems in factories, which is essential for coordinating complex workflows and handling large-scale industrial data.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's a modern alternative to MQTT for industrial IoT with better security and multi-tenancy?

NATS provides a decentralized security model using NKeys and JWTs instead of broker-side ACL synchronization. Each tenant receives account-level isolation with its own security domain. This eliminates the need to sync access control lists across federated brokers. The approach scales multi-tenant deployments without central coordination overhead. Learn more about NATS

How do I bridge OT and IT networks with a lightweight messaging layer?

NATS leaf nodes deployed on the factory floor initiate outbound-only connections to a central cluster on port 7422. This eliminates the need for inbound firewall rules, VPN tunnels, or complex network configuration. OT and IT systems exchange messages transparently through the leaf node connection. Learn more about NATS leaf nodes

What architecture connects factory floor telemetry to cloud analytics without vendor lock-in?

NATS is open source under the Apache 2.0 license and runs on any infrastructure. Leaf nodes collect data at the edge, JetStream persists it locally, and cloud consumers subscribe to forwarded streams. There is no proprietary protocol or vendor dependency in the data path. Learn more about JetStream

How do I modernize a SCADA system replacing legacy messaging with cloud-native architecture?

NATS leaf nodes deploy at each SCADA site with JetStream providing store-and-forward persistence. NATS servers have native MQTT support, maintaining compatibility with legacy sensors during incremental migration. This allows modernization alongside existing systems without requiring a full replacement. Learn more about NATS MQTT support

How do I connect PLCs and industrial sensors to a cloud analytics platform?

NATS uses subject-based addressing such as plant.line.machine.sensor to organize sensor data hierarchically. An edge leaf node collects readings and JetStream persists them locally. Configured stream mirrors or sources replicate data to cloud consumers. This subject hierarchy maps directly to physical plant topology. Learn more about NATS subjects

How do I monitor multiple manufacturing plants with a single messaging system?

NATS supports multi-tenant accounts where each plant gets its own isolated account and leaf node. Centralized observability is available through system events and Prometheus-compatible monitoring endpoints. Operators can monitor all sites from a unified dashboard. Learn more about NATS monitoring

What messaging architecture supports both edge processing and cloud analytics for industrial IoT?

NATS JetStream streams run at the edge for local processing. Mirror or source streams replicate data to the cloud for analytics. Both tiers operate within the same system with no separate bridge or pipeline required. This eliminates the complexity of managing separate edge and cloud messaging platforms. Learn more about JetStream streams

How do I build a unified namespace for smart manufacturing without HiveMQ?

NATS subject hierarchy such as plant.line.machine.sensor serves as a unified namespace without broker lock-in. Multi-tenancy is built in through account isolation, so each business unit operates independently. No central broker dependency or vendor-specific tooling is required. Learn more about NATS subjects

How should I design subject hierarchies for manufacturing — does token position affect performance?

NATS subject matching is left-to-right algorithmically, but token position has negligible performance impact on modern hardware. Focus on what reads correctly from a business domain taxonomy perspective — that yields bigger long-term dividends than micro-optimization. Order tokens from lower to higher cardinality, since message types tend to grow faster than deployment zones. Think carefully about where you will filter with the > wildcard, especially with JetStream sources — for example, zone.eu.> captures all EU traffic concisely. Some tokens act as prefix qualifiers and must stay grouped with subsequent tokens. Consider adding a version token for managed future growth, using * to match any version. If you get the hierarchy wrong, NATS supports subject remapping to facilitate migration without breaking existing clients. Learn more about NATS subjects

Are there integrations available for feeding NATS messages into databases?

NATS does not include a built-in connector ecosystem like Kafka Connect, but prototyping integrations is straightforward. There are two types: a source (database to NATS) and a sink (NATS to database). Source integrations are trickier — they require understanding how the source system emits change data capture records. With Postgres, the most reliable approach hooks into logical replication; alternatively, the outbox pattern works if you control the source application. Sink integrations translate messages and write to a target database. The happy path is simple, but failure cases are challenging — for example, if a message is inserted successfully but the acknowledgment to NATS fails, the message will be redelivered, so the sink must ensure idempotent writes. Use JetStream streams for both source and sink integrations so messages persist and can be retried on connection failures. Learn more about JetStream

Last updated: March 2026

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