Antares in the NGSI-LD ecosystem

A compliant peer, not a fork

NGSI-LD (ETSI GS CIM 009) is the context-management standard behind FIWARE-style smart-city platforms, and its whole point is that brokers are interchangeable: the same entities, queries, subscriptions and federation registrations work against any compliant implementation. Antares is a from-scratch Rust implementation of that standard — it shares no code with Orion-LD, Scorpio or Stellio, follows their naming tradition, and federates with them over the standard distributed- operations API. A deployment can mix brokers per site and migrate between them by replaying declarative state; conformance is the contract, and Antares publishes its evidence continuously on the ETSI conformance report page.

Where Antares fits best

  • Resource-constrained and edge deployments — a ~35 MiB broker reaches places a JVM stack does not: industrial gateways, in-vehicle units, one-per-site municipal boxes (deployment).
  • The browser and offline-first tooling — the wasm build is an NGSI-LD broker with zero installation: training environments, demos that need no backend, per-user sandboxes, edge UIs that keep working disconnected (wasm).
  • High-density multi-tenancy — one shared schema with Row-Level Security and a 10,000-tenant design target makes per-user or per-department context spaces cheap, instead of one broker per tenant.

The configuration plane

Antares deliberately stays a vanilla data-plane engine: no YAML bootstrap, no vendor config API. Declarative city configuration — entities, subscriptions, registrations, pipelines as Git-versioned manifests, reconciled through the standard API — is a companion-project concern (the "city-as-code" pattern described in operations → upgrades). That split is what keeps the broker upgradable and replaceable, and it works with any compliant broker, not just Antares.

Standards posture

Implementation is spec-first against CIM 009 V1.9.1 (one ledger file per clause under docs/spec/); suspected defects in the official test suite are proven from the spec text and raised upstream at ETSI rather than worked around. Smart Data Models payloads work as-is — see the smart-city example dataset in the repository.