Unified Namespace (UNS)

[MarianRaphael]

Description

This epic is a collection of issues enhancing the Unified Namespace (UNS) functionalities, leveraging the strengths of Node-RED as a foundational tool for data contextualization, connect, collect and store.

Which customers would this be available to

Other (See comments)

### In Progress
- [ ] https://github.com/FlowFuse/flowfuse/issues/4726

### Scheduled - Expected Mid Feb
- [ ] https://github.com/FlowFuse/flowfuse/issues/4908
- [ ] https://github.com/FlowFuse/flowfuse/issues/4785
- [ ] https://github.com/FlowFuse/flowfuse/issues/4788
- [ ] https://github.com/FlowFuse/flowfuse/issues/5046

### Ideas
- [ ] https://github.com/FlowFuse/flowfuse/issues/4867
- [ ] https://github.com/FlowFuse/flowfuse/issues/3444
- [ ] https://github.com/FlowFuse/flowfuse/issues/4911
- [ ] https://github.com/FlowFuse/flowfuse/issues/4910
- [ ] https://github.com/FlowFuse/flowfuse/issues/4868
- [ ] MQTT Broker Clusters & scalability
- [ ] Threshold Alerting
- [ ] https://github.com/FlowFuse/flowfuse/issues/4870
- [ ] UNS/MQTT Experience within Node-RED

[joepavitt]

Chatting with @robmarcer and @gstout52, notes as follows:

• UNS, by-design, shouldn't have validation
  • This needs validating/references
  • HiveMQ offer this validation
• When build UNS for ___ on FlowFuse, what were the biggest pain points?
  • Rob didn't build the UNS, that already existed
  • Multiple brokers already existed (~100 brokers) in a swarm/collection
  • Schema agreed upon with topic hierarchy
    • Documentation exists, but not been seen
  • Using MQTT Explorer to get Topic Hierarchy and Data Structure for each topic
• UNS needs easy way to persist data, view topic hierarchy, query data
• Less important is the validation piece
  • "Reactive Validation" would be useful
  • Only humans currently capturing errors?
• Data Aggregation
• Schema design
  • Documentation must live somewhere?
  • https://www.asyncapi.com/en

[joepavitt]

We currently offer view-mode for topics, and as an obvious "next step" I think we have A or B routes available to us, with an ideal end goal of achieving all of these blocks.

[gstout52]

@joepavitt I had an insightful conversation with a prospect about UNS. For privacy, I'm linking to the notes doc for that prospect rather than sharing in a public repo.

Have a look at where this prospect sees the main value add that can be provided by a FlowFuse UNS, along with competitors they are currently using, and how they're currently using them.