Infras
An infra is a communications platform comprising of an MQTT broker plus some ancilliary services for monitoring/alerting, with a collection of edge devices communicating over it.
A Bit of History
Infras were originally software stacks running all the services required to provide SMC platform functionality for a particular installation.
But, some devices appear in multiple infras, so the separation between installations was not as clear-cut as originally expected.
And, some services make more sense with a multi-tenant approach, i.e. one service handles the same functionality for multiple infras.
The whole notion of infras is therefore a bit dodgy, and we are working on replacing it with something better. In the meantime, we do still need it for the sake of data-siloing and for backwards compatibility with the single-tenant services.