Aqago
Overview
Aqago is developer-first software infrastructure for physical devices. It helps engineers, teams, and companies get physical systems to market faster and manage them more effectively at scale while keeping the infrastructure needed to do so under their control. It provides capabilities like Supabase for device software projects in areas like robotics and IoT.
Aqago is self hosted to provide flexibility to meet real-world deployment models. For example, Aqago supports federating deployments into a VPC per customer, a common requirement when integrating complex hardware systems (like robots) into enterprise IT/OT environments on the factory floor, medical facilities, and critical infrastructure sites. Aqago is also suited for deployment models more commonly used in consumer/business IoT products, e.g. one publicly available instance for the entire fleet.
Aqago is actively maintained by Aqa Technologies, Inc. Aqago was intially built to support Aqalink, a suite of edge networking products and software platform to scale remote operations in the physical world. Aqalink continues to be built on Aqago, but Aqago's reach has expanded to other teams and products.
Philosophy
Aqago is built on the observation that software engineering for physical systems — whether robots, connected devices, or industrial equipment — isn’t a fundamentally different discipline. It’s the same core application engineering, but applied in a different design context: one shaped by constraints like intermittent connectivity, heterogeneous networks, limited compute, and real-world operational requirements.
This perspective informs Aqago’s design approach: use the best ideas from modern application engineering wherever possible, but adapt them thoughtfully where the realities of the physical world demand it. Not everything from web infrastructure cleanly carries over, but a surprising amount does.
As a result, Aqago’s design goals are:
- Keep it simple
- Don’t reinvent the wheel
- Prioritize developer and user experience
- Be customizable, but with sensible defaults
- Optimize for security, reliability, and scalability
Aqago minimizes its baseline surface area and leaves it to users to customize and extend its capabilities to fit their infrastructure when necessary. It aims to be supportive, not prescriptive, and makes no assumptions about business logic or product functionality.
It avoids making assumptions, either explicit or implicit, about how teams should manage device code, what business logic they should implement, or how devices should behave. These decisions vary by team, company, product, market, and other factors, and are best left outside of Aqago.
Deployment Targets
Aqago supports various deployment targets for the backend and device agent,
Backend
| Target | Status | Deployment method |
|---|---|---|
| AWS | ✅ Official Support | CloudFormation, Terraform |
| Azure | 🛠️ Planned | Bicep, Terraform |
| Docker | 🛠️ Planned | Various |
Device Agent
| Target | Status | Deployment method |
|---|---|---|
| Linux (x86) | ✅ Official Support | curl agent.aqago.com | bash |
| Linux (arm64) | ✅ Official Support | curl agent.aqago.com | bash |
| Windows | 🛠️ Planned | TBD |
Costs
Aqago is designed to minimize cloud provider costs. There are several ways it achieves this.
First, Aqago is conceptually a metadata management system. Cloud providers charge for many things, key among them being data storage, movement, and compute. Because Aqago manages metadata about your devices in your fleet, it stores and processes small volumes of data. A typical Aqago deployment in AWS will incur ~$0.05 per device per month in charges with no content storage.
Aqago further minimizes cloud provider costs through a series of optimizations
specific to the provider. For example, on AWS the Aqago backend targets arm64
serverless runners (Lambda) which are currently 20% cheaper than the x86
equivalent. In addition, Aqago minimzes its devops burden by leveraging
zero-maintenance offerings like DynamoDB that provide hassle-free horizontal
scaling.
The biggest factor in deployment costs is content storage. When using AWS, Aqago relies on S3 for storing content, meaning costs follow standard S3 pricing. However, because the amount and retention of content are dictated by your specific use case and business logic, you have full control over your cost strategy.
Features
Aqago provides the following core features,
- Device and API authentication with short-lived tokens
- Content storage and retrieval with optional application-scoped permissions
- Device and application configuration management
- Monitoring and observability, including heartbeat, boot history, logging, etc.
Architecture
Aqago's architecture is designed to be modular and scalable, allowing it to fit various deployment models and use cases. The core components of Aqago include:
- Aqago Backend: The central component that manages metadata, authentication, configuration, and monitoring. It is designed to run on cloud provider infrastructure, leveraging serverless technologies for cost efficiency and scalability.
- Aqago Agent: A lightweight agent that runs on edge devices, responsible for communicating with the Aqago Backend, handling device-specific tasks, and ensuring secure operations.
- Aqago CLI: A command-line interface tool that allows developers and operators to interact with the Aqago Backend, manage deployments, and perform administrative tasks.
Licensing
Aqago is source-available and BSL licensed. Licenses include ready-made and infrastructure as code templates that can be used to deploy Aqago into your Cloud provider manually or via CI.
For licensing terms and pricing, email us at hi@aqago.com.