Introduction

IoT is the next revolution in computing and is truly the first step toward a digital business. Connected sensors, devices, and intelligent operations can transform businesses and enable new growth opportunities. A critical part of IoT is cloud-based solutions that enable you to connect, secure, and manage IoT devices, as well as providing deep insights from IoT data. Microsoft Azure is an all-in-one IoT platform which provides ways to implement end-to-end IoT solutions.

The recipes in this chapter will primarily focus on getting you started with the Microsoft Azure IoT platform, understanding the IoT lifecycle, and each phase of the IoT solution, followed by which, we will also consider how to create an IoT Hub and how the IoT Hub endpoints work. You will also be introduced to the Azure IoT Suite introduction. We will go through the sizing of different IoT Hub instances and will end with pricing calculations for IoT Hubs. IoT Hub is a central connection point for IoT devices and IoT solution, the features Hub supports are IoT specific.

Getting started with the Microsoft Azure IoT platform

Microsoft Azure supports connectivity, data ingestion, storage, to analytics using a diverse set of cloud offerings. One can easily adopt the Microsoft platform for reliable and secure IoT device-to-cloud communication when you build any IoT solution.

Azure IoT Suite image from Microsoft documentation

Components of the IoT platform

Today, IoT is described using various definitions; however, it essentially consists of four basic areas:

• Things: Any physical thing, such as line-of-business assets, including industry devices or sensors
• Connectivity: Those things that have connectivity to the internet
• Data: Those things that can collect and communicate information – this information may include data collected from the environment
• Analytics: The analytics that come with the data produce insight and enable people or machines to take actions that drive business outcomes

Microsoft's IoT platform's core foundation is the Azure cloud platform; it has a set of services to help companies achieve the benefits of implementing an IoT strategy. Microsoft's Azure IoT services are a set of IoT capabilities, outlined in the following, enabling enterprises to build and realize value from IoT solutions quickly and efficiently. As part of core IoT offerings, Microsoft Azure IoT services enable Microsoft to meet the customers wherever they are in their IoT journey – whether they are focused on where to start, or are ready to scale IoT scenarios which will transform their digital business.

The Azure IoT approach to providing such an IoT platform is built on three foundational pillars. These IoT services set Microsoft apart from other vendors – no other vendor delivers the breadth of capabilities, enterprise level service, and scale that Microsoft does.

• Comprehensive technology: The most comprehensive set of IoT technologies, to help customers connect, analyze, and act on insights
• Enterprise focus: The services are built on an enterprise grade cloud that take advantage of all the scalability and security features we have enabled in our cloud
• Global scale: By leveraging Azure IoT services, customers can seamlessly scale from Proof of Concept (PoC) to global deployment on Microsoft's hyper-scale worldwide infrastructure

Microsoft Azure IoT platform

The IoT solutions offered by Microsoft Azure are broadly divided into two categories. These are Azure IoT Suite and Azure IoT Hub. IoT solutions, including Azure IoT Suite and Azure IoT Hub, harness the power of our full cloud, data and developer offerings for the enterprise to provide hyper-scale IoT services, rich data and analytics, and deep integration. The IoT Suite is generally used by developers to build custom solutions using IoT SDKs. Microsoft Azure IoT SDK are open source are easily available to download from GitHub. It supports various language like C#, Node.JS, C, and Java. you can use any machine which is capable of development with these technologies.

The Azure IoT offerings are customizable to fit the unique needs of organizations. It will provides finished applications to speed deployment of common scenarios we see across many industries. Some example of such common scenarios are remote monitoring, asset management and predictive maintenance. It can grow and scale solutions to millions of things. The Azure platform provides a simple pricing model while providing a rich set of capabilities, so companies can plan and budget appropriately. This approach is aimed at simplifying the complexities that often exist with implementing and costing IoT solutions. Along with this, Microsoft and its partners also provide a workshop in which one can identify IoT scenarios, and at the end of this workshop, they can decide to work on common goals. These workshops have various stages starting right from business problem identification, implementing PoC, to development and trials with organizational readiness and implementing it across an organization to achieve the business outcome following the path for the digitization of the business.

Developers can start building custom solutions using IoT Hub or get started quickly with the comprehensive pre-configured solutions of Azure IoT Suite (which includes Azure IoT Hub). This book will focus mostly on Azure IoT Hub and IoT Suite.