A federation is a concept to enable offloading a large solution workload between ThingWorx servers. If you have independent regional servers or server clusters, peer-to-peer data connections can be established using a federation to offload and manipulate data. ThingWorx can be used to implement these connections, and ThingWorx Things can offload properties and services between servers. The same version of ThingWorx should be used between all federated instances.

A primary use case for a federation is off-loading high volume disk IO (such as high frequency stream writes) to a persistence optimized server. To do this, you create a Remote Thing on the server receiving the data, and the Remote Thing acts as a proxy object to a federated server where the actual persistence object is running.

In ThingWorx, a federation can be used to obtain other Thing's services and properties. Any published Thing can be accessed as a Remote Thing from a federated server.

To configure a federation in ThingWorx, the Thing’s (stream, value stream, data table, wiki, or blog) information is published to a Remote Thing. For authentication purposes, an application key is created on the Remote Thing’s server, and is required to offload the data. When configuring a federated remote wiki or remote blog, it is not necessary to specify a Data Shape.