Eclipse Zenoh
Zenoh Protocol
Unifying the IoT / Edge / Cloud continuum
A protocol that unifies data in motion, data at rest, and computations. From 2KB microcontrollers to cloud clusters.
Explore Zenoh
Report
Monthly digest of Zenoh innovations, ecosystem highlights, and community stories.
Papers
Scientific publications and research on the Zenoh protocol.
Book
The comprehensive guide to Zenoh — architecture, concepts, and hands-on examples.
Talks
Conference presentations and technical talks by Angelo Corsaro.
The Genesis of Zenoh
How a protocol was born from necessity — and named after a philosopher
Around 2009–2010, while serving as PrismTech’s CTO and co-chairing the OMG DDS Special Interest Group, Angelo Corsaro was working on some of the earliest Extremely Large Scale Systems — deployments spanning military, aerospace, and Smart City infrastructure. Two structural problems crystallised.
The Scale Problem
DDS could not scale up to global networks, nor down to constrained devices. CoAP was too cloud-centric; MQTT’s broker model forced even co-located devices to communicate through a server thousands of kilometres away.
The Transparency Gap
Pub/Sub had achieved location transparency for data in motion. But once data was stored, that transparency vanished — forcing everything onto centralised cloud storage. Applications needing low-latency access to stored data had no good answer.
Systems of that era — what Angelo calls the “Digital Frankenstein” era — were assembled by duct-taping multiple protocol stacks together, crossing fingers for decent end-to-end semantics. His goal became clear: design a single protocol spanning microcontroller to data-centre, with no topological constraints and unified abstractions for data in motion, data at rest, and computations.
“I had to do something. I started working on the idea of coming up with a protocol that could work efficiently from the microcontroller up to the data-center, would not have any topological constraints and would provide unified abstraction for dealing with data in movement and data at rest.”
Why “Zenoh”?
The name carries two philosophical references and one engineering acronym. Growing up in Sicily, Angelo was surrounded by the legacy of ancient Greek philosophy. He was particularly drawn to Zeno of Elea (Zenon d’Élée), whose paradoxes of infinity fascinated him from childhood.
Stoicism — founded by Zenon of Citium — left an equally deep mark through Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
The difference between Zenon and Zenoh is less than a letter — it is just the overshoot of the “h”.
Zero Overhead
Designed for the most resource-constrained environments. Zenoh's wire format is minimal, efficient, and deterministic.
Runs Everywhere
From 2KB RAM microcontrollers to multi-datacenter cloud deployments. One protocol, every tier of your stack.
Location Transparent
Producers and consumers are fully decoupled. Move resources between edge and cloud without changing application code.