What is the Mesh of Things (MoT)?
Mesh of Things is a decentralised alternative to traditional networking and over-the-air updates that improves performance, reduces resource usage, and lowers operating costs. From corporate servers to Raspberry Pis, a "thing" in the Mesh of Things can be anything.
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🚀 Key Features ​
- Connect everything, from corporate servers to Raspberry Pis and everything in between
- Over-the-air updates to multiple operating systems and hardware types simultaneously
- Device monitoring and logs all from the online dashboard
- Organization-wide events to investigate Docker runtime activity across all devices from one page
- Peer-to-peer connections between your devices without the need to open firewall ports on your network
- Affordable and flexible with no vendor lock-in
Connect everything ​
MoT allows you to connect multiple hardware types and operating systems, including macOS, Linux, and Windows, in one harmonious Mesh of Things network.
Here are some examples from our users:
Industrial IoT Cloud services and datacenters Corporate VPNs Gaming services Digital signage Home and/or office infrastructure Many more... Peer-to-peer connections ​
MoT's mesh network architecture allows direct communication between devices on the same overlay network without opening firewall ports on your network. This contrasts with traditional networking, where devices communicate with each other via a centralised service, such as a server or cloud service provider, and often rely on ports exposed to the internet.
When devices come online, they identify themselves to one of our highly available MoT Postmen replicas located around the world, which allows devices on your overlay network to discover each other. Device ports on your overlay network can be opened and closed on a per-device basis or in bulk from the dashboard. These ports are exposed only to other devices on your overlay network, not to the internet. After devices have identified themselves with the MoT Postmen, communication and authentication happen directly between the devices without the need for a centralised service to relay traffic or handle authentication. This greatly improves the security, performance, and reliability of your network by removing the MoT servers from the communication path between online devices.
Over-the-air updates ​
MoT allows you to network and update multiple devices simultaneously over the air, regardless of their operating system or hardware type. This means you can update the software running on your Linux servers, Macs, Windows computers, and IoT devices like Raspberry Pis from the same dashboard at the same time.
Example use cases
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are a common example of technologies that benefit from OTA updates. IoT devices are often deployed in remote locations, making them difficult to update manually. From remote sensors in hard-to-reach locations to your fridge or smart speaker, technology is increasingly integrated into the world around us, and that technology, like any other, benefits from regular updates.
IoT, however, is only one example of the many types of devices that can benefit from OTA updates. Industrial settings increasingly use hardware in factory production lines, retail settings use digital signage, and companies use multiple servers to manage their infrastructure. Almost every industry today uses, or could benefit from, technology that requires OTA updates to keep devices up to date and secure.
Simply install Docker or another supported container runtime on your devices, link your devices to the MoT Cloud by running the MoT Agent container, and you are ready to start managing the devices from the dashboard.
TIP
Looking for even more granular control? You can connect your laptop to your MoT Mesh network and communicate directly with your devices via their Docker socket, allowing the same level of control and interaction as if the containers were running locally.
Device monitoring and logs ​
MoT allows you to monitor the status of your applications, view application logs, and restart applications from the MoT dashboard. Each device detail page includes Overview, Logs, and Terminal tabs, giving you immediate visibility into device health and runtime state. Sending engineers to hardware to debug and fix issues is expensive and often unnecessary. MoT brings the data and tools you need into one place.
This is only the beginning of what is possible with MoT. You can also connect your laptop to your MoT network and interact with your devices as if they were on your local network.
Organization-wide events ​
MoT Events provides incident and outage visibility with a searchable, organization-wide history of Docker runtime activity across your devices. From the Events page in the dashboard, your team can investigate restarts, lifecycle changes, and OOM kills without opening each device view individually, while also tracking day-to-day event activity important to business operations.
Use filters for app, device, action, resource type, and free-text search to quickly narrow results. Supported resource types include containers, volumes, networks, secrets, and configs. You can sort newest-first or oldest-first and continue browsing with cursor-based "Load more" pagination.
Affordable and flexible ​
MoT is optimised to reduce the cost of over-the-air updates and device management. Industries around the world can benefit from over-the-air updates and device management, but are often unable to justify the cost of legacy solutions.
Example industries benefiting from MoT cost savings
In the Industrial Internet of Things, the devices used are not always directly tied to the product being sold, but are part of the process of producing it efficiently. In these cases, it can be hard to justify the high cost of other OTA update solutions.
Industries that provide services to other businesses, such as digital signage, also find it difficult to justify the cost of other solutions, as the OTA update cost per device is often higher than the profit margin on the individual device being sold.
Through MoT, we open the benefits of OTA updates to everyone, regardless of the product, the size of your business, or the industry you operate in.
We reduce costs for our users by:
- Removing the need for idle device traffic: Other solutions require always-on VPN connections to monitor and update devices, which consume backend resources and bandwidth. Our mesh network infrastructure takes a different approach. Devices are always available via the Mesh network without the need for idle connections, allowing us to activate traffic between devices only when you access the dashboard. This reduces demand on your devices and lowers the cost of our backend services, which lets us pass those savings on to you.
- Removing the cost of device-to-device traffic: MoT uses a peer-to-peer network architecture, which means our backend does not need to handle traffic between your devices. This reduces demand on our servers when supporting large fleets and improves the performance of your connections.
- Avoiding vendor lock-in: We avoid vendor lock-in out of principle, but also because it reduces costs for our users. You can use Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry, or any of the many other efficient and often free services for hosting your containers. By allowing you to choose your container registries, you benefit from diverse solutions and MoT does not need to charge you for services you already have.
- Pooling our users' resources: We are all better together. By pooling our users' resources to create OTA update solutions at scale, we can provide a more reliable, resilient and cost-effective service for less than the cost of users trying to run it alone.
- Focusing on our users' core needs: We have a focused purpose and mission, so you only pay for the services you need.
- Being efficient: Efficient, low-cost solutions without compromise on security or stability are at the core of our mission. We have no intention of being modest; we are proud of our thorough research, design, and implementation, which maximise every opportunity to improve your service and save you money.