Anschlussmanager

Anschlussmanager is a German term used in IT and industry to denote a software component that orchestrates and manages connections between a system and external devices or services. It handles lifecycle management of connections, including provisioning, onboarding, authentication, authorization, parameter negotiation, session management, monitoring, and tear-down.

It supports discovery of new endpoints, credential storage (with secure secret management), and policy-driven connection rules. It often implements retries with backoff, timeout handling, and fallbacks. It may perform protocol translation or protocol-appropriate handshakes, multiplexing multiple connections over a single channel, and load balancing across redundant paths.

In architecture, an Anschlussmanager can be a standalone microservice, part of an edge gateway, or a cloud-based integration component. It exposes management APIs (REST or gRPC) to configure connections and uses device management protocols (MQTT, AMQP, HTTPS, etc.) to maintain active sessions. It integrates with identity and access management, secret stores, and logging/audit systems.

Use cases include IoT device onboarding to cloud platforms, linking external business services via APIs, connecting payment terminals, or integrating factory sensors with enterprise systems. It centralizes policy enforcement, monitoring, and telemetry, reducing duplication across services.

Key challenges include scalability to thousands or millions of connections, ensuring low latency, robustness in intermittent networks, and secure handling of credentials and keys. Best practices emphasize strong authentication, encryption in transit, regular credential rotation, observability, and fault tolerance.