TBMQ was primarily designed to aggregate data from IoT devices and reliably deliver it to backend applications. Applications subscribe to data from tens or even hundreds of thousands of devices and require reliable message delivery. Additionally, applications often experience periods of downtime due to system maintenance, upgrades, failover scenarios, or temporary network disruptions. IoT devices typically publish data frequently but subscribe to relatively few topics or updates.

To address these differences, TBMQ classifies MQTT clients as either application clients or standard IoT devices. Application clients are always persistent and rely on Kafka for session persistence and message delivery. In contrast, standard IoT devices — referred to as DEVICE clients in TBMQ — can be configured as persistent depending on the use case.