Device provisioning at scale
As you saw in Chapter 2, device provisioning is fairly easy when you are provisioning a few devices through IoT Hub. You just need to provide a unique ID and some kind of attestation. Attestation is proof that you are who you say you are and can be implemented using a key or certificate. Once a connection has been established, it is configured to its initial state. If this process is manually repeated for many devices, it becomes error-prone and inefficient.
Fortunately, Microsoft has provided DPS to make this process more efficient and reliable. It includes features such as secure attestation, enrollment lists, allocation policies, monitoring, logging, encryption, multi-hub support, and cross-regional support. It also supports open source SDKs in various languages to program against its APIs.
To get started with DPS, you can provision one through the Azure portal or use the CLI. The following figure shows how to provision DPS in the Azure portal...
