Building a Global, Cloud-Native IoT Platform for Connected Agriculture
How can agricultural machinery operating in remote environments reliably stream real-time data to the cloud at global scale?
AGCO, a global leader in agricultural machinery and precision farming technology, needed to connect its worldwide fleet of tractors, harvesters, and farming equipment to the cloud. These machines operate in some of the most challenging environments on earth—often with unreliable connectivity, limited bandwidth, and high latency.
To unlock the next generation of precision agriculture, AGCO required a platform capable of ingesting massive volumes of telemetry data while delivering real-time insights to farmers and fleet managers. The system needed to be resilient, fault-tolerant, and dependable enough to support equipment that farmers rely on daily.
Beyond scale and connectivity, the platform had to support real-time analytics, predictive maintenance, and future data-driven capabilities—without compromising reliability or operational continuity. This meant building an IoT foundation designed specifically for agricultural-grade workloads rather than adapting generic enterprise tooling.
AGCO engaged Westpoint to architect and deliver a cloud-native IoT platform from scratch—capable of handling global scale, unreliable networks, and high-throughput telemetry while remaining flexible enough to evolve with the future of connected farming.
A cloud-native, event-driven IoT platform built for global scale and agricultural reliability.
Westpoint partnered with AGCO as Lead Developer and Solutions Architect, taking ownership of the platform's architecture and implementation while embedding directly with AGCO's product team.
Architecture & platform design
- Cloud-native AWS architecture designed for global IoT workloads
- Event-driven microservices architecture with independent scaling
- Enterprise message bus enabling resilient data ingestion and processing
- Secure, containerized services with full infrastructure automation
Core features delivered
- High-throughput telemetry ingestion from connected machinery
- Real-time stream processing and analytics for machine data
- MQTT-based connectivity optimized for low-bandwidth environments
- Custom JSON API framework ensuring consistent data exchange
- Secure secrets management and platform-wide security controls
Delivery approach
- Embedded delivery model as Lead Developer and Solutions Architect
- Microservices-first design using Docker and Kubernetes
- Infrastructure-as-code with Terraform for reproducible deployments
- Security-by-design using HashiCorp Vault from day one
The result
Production-ready global IoT platform
AGCO launched a fully operational IoT platform powering its connected agriculture initiatives worldwide.
Scalable telemetry from thousands of machines
The platform reliably ingests and processes real-time data from agricultural equipment operating across global, remote environments.
Foundation for precision agriculture and predictive maintenance
Real-time analytics and streaming pipelines enabled advanced use cases such as predictive maintenance and precision farming insights.
Open-source contributions to the developer ecosystem
Core components, including harvesterjs and hapi-harvester, were open-sourced--contributing reusable tooling back to the wider developer community.
THE CLIENT'S REQUEST
- Connect global agricultural machinery to the cloud
- Handle unreliable connectivity and massive telemetry volumes
- Enable real-time data processing and analytics
- Build a scalable, cloud-native IoT foundation
- Support future precision agriculture initiatives
WHAT WE DID
- Built a cloud-native IoT platform from scratch on AWS
- Implemented event-driven microservices with an enterprise message bus
- Delivered real-time telemetry pipelines using the SMACK stack
- Integrated MQTT connectivity optimized for agricultural environments
- Enabled precision agriculture and predictive maintenance capabilities
