Hello All, We are evaluating flespi as a potential component for a new system that we are building. So far we are very impressed with the platform, documentation & ease of integrating it with other services. We have a few questions related to the limits/restrictions you have listed for your commercial plan here : For the commercial plan, the total storage allowed is stated as 1 GB (The tool-tip says "Total amount of used storage on the platform by MQTT sessions, channels, devices, containers, CDNs, etc."), Is this limit for the metadata related to those objects (sessions, channels, devices etc.) or it includes the channel buffer storage etc. too? Because a little bit down the page, it says the "Stored data per channel" limit is 10 GB. The number of active connections are limited to 50,000. Can this be interpreted as 50,000 unique tracking devices can simultaneously report to a channel? Also, from the documentation it seems like you are only counting TCP connections, what about channels using a UDP transport? Can I assume a message will be cleared from the channel buffer once it's consumed either by the REST API or the MQTT subscriptions to the channel APIs? We were also thinking about what will happen in the unlikely event of all of our systems, consuming the messages, from flespi channels fail. It will make the channel buffer sizes to go over the 1 GB (or 10 GB) limit in a few hours and could potentially result in data loss. Do you have (or are you guys thinking of implementing) an option to switch to the "Extra" plan automatically in this case? The customer will have an option to automatically scale channel buffer storage, MQTT active sessions (in case of more than 10,000 active MQTT clients) etc. on demand and then scale it back when not needed anymore. What is the limit of active MQTT sessions for "Commercial" plan? This one? Or this one? We are also planning to maintain a development account using the Free plan, it seems like the account will be deleted if inactive for 60 days. Do the API calls and MQTT sessions count as activity? Or we have to login to flespi.io once in 60 days.? Thanks in advance. Muneeb

Questions regarding the limits/restrictions

muneeb

Hello All,
We are evaluating flespi as a potential component for a new system that we are building.
So far we are very impressed with the platform, documentation & ease of integrating it with other services.
We have a few questions related to the limits/restrictions you have listed for your commercial plan here:

For the commercial plan, the total storage allowed is stated as 1 GB

(The tool-tip says "Total amount of used storage on the platform by MQTT sessions, channels, devices, containers, CDNs, etc."), Is this limit for the metadata related to those objects (sessions, channels, devices etc.) or it includes the channel buffer storage etc. too? Because a little bit down the page, it says the "Stored data per channel" limit is 10 GB.
The number of active connections are limited to 50,000. Can this be interpreted as 50,000 unique tracking devices can simultaneously report to a channel? Also, from the documentation it seems like you are only counting TCP connections, what about channels using a UDP transport?
Can I assume a message will be cleared from the channel buffer once it's consumed either by the REST API or the MQTT subscriptions to the channel APIs?
We were also thinking about what will happen in the unlikely event of all of our systems, consuming the messages, from flespi channels fail. It will make the channel buffer sizes to go over the 1 GB (or 10 GB) limit in a few hours and could potentially result in data loss. Do you have (or are you guys thinking of implementing) an option to switch to the "Extra" plan automatically in this case? The customer will have an option to automatically scale channel buffer storage, MQTT active sessions (in case of more than 10,000 active MQTT clients) etc. on demand and then scale it back when not needed anymore.
What is the limit of active MQTT sessions for "Commercial" plan?
This one?

Or this one?
We are also planning to maintain a development account using the Free plan, it seems like the account will be deleted if inactive for 60 days. Do the API calls and MQTT sessions count as activity? Or we have to login to flespi.io once in 60 days.?

Thanks in advance.
Muneeb

shal

muneeb Thanks for good questions. Here are the answers.

1 and 5: In terms of use, there are 3 sections: how many items are included in the plan for Commercial in base price or for Free in total, Extra section shows the extra cost if you will consume more than included and restrictions show absolute maximum and platform reaction on reaching the threshold.
For the Storage - Commercial plan includes 1GB of storage and than you pay $1/month for any extra storage of telematics data. Your current combined storage use is displayed on flespi.io dashboard.
In restrictions you see that one channel storage is limited to 10GB, it means that you may create hundreds of channels, but each channel can have maximum of 10GB of buffer storage.
For active MQTT sessions - 10K are included into Commercial plan, but for each 1K sessions over it you will pay $1/month. Restrictions specifies that in any circumstances you are not allowed to have more then 10M active MQTT sessions.
We have some explanations on how platform usage is calculated, just in case.

2: We do not limit UDP, they are auto-limited by maximum number of messages per minutes in one channel (see restrictions). We only limit quantity of active TCP connections.

3 and 4: Channel buffer is accessed separately via special REST API GET/DELETE calls. You may disable it at all and use streams for pushing data to your platform (they have own limits) or use MQTT subscribtions. If using MQTT you may even use shared subscriptions to load-balance your consumers, each MQTT session will have its own restrictions in accumulated size while offline and you can have thousands of sessions in case of problems. Same with streams - if you see that there is some problem with your receiver you may create another stream, subscribe it to same channels or devices and pause previous one. Some of our high-load users already did this, usually stream gives you at least few hours, may be even days until you filled its 10GB buffer and your users/bots will notify you about the problems in your system much earlier. See here more information about messages from flespi and how to consume them.

6: API calls, MQTT sessions, traffic via channels or streams - almost any kind of normal activity is counted as alive account. You may just construct the system and from that point of time never login, it will continue to operate. But take into account that sometimes we do some changes, in very rare cases they may be incompatible to your system so we advise you to monitor this forum and especially one place for everything is flespi NOC.

muneeb

shal Thank you very much for the detailed reply. We will get back to you if we have more questions.

Muneeb