What is Azure IoT Hub-Azure IoT Part 3

1. Pre-requisite Knowledge –

Before you understand the Azure IoT (Internet of things), I recommend you should know –

• Basic knowledge of cloud computing
• Basic knowledge of Microsoft Azure and pillars of Azure cloud
• Basic knowledge of IoT, Microsoft Azure IoT
• Basic knowledge of IoT Architecture

2. Background –

In my previous articles, we have seen an overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) and what is Microsoft IoT and its architecture.

In this article, I would like to explain details about what Azure IoT Hub is.

3. Azure IoT Hub-

As we have seen, Azure IoT applications are based on TIA –

• Things - which are nothing devices which send data
• Insights - to generate meaningful data which is useful for a business need
• Actions – Activities to improve the business based on the data output generated from insights

Now we know, IoT has the capability for unidirectional/bidirectional communication between digital devices and Azure backend services to generate more insight on the data and take decision based on the output. This communication happens through the centralized message hub named as ‘Azure IoT hub. It is a managed service hosted in the cloud. Azure IoT can handle reliable millions of devices backend solution in a secure way. It is a very great feature in terms of monitoring the health of IoT solutions with tracking events such as device creation, device failures, and device connections meaning it helps us to build scalable, full-featured IoT solutions.

Azure IoT hub can handle millions of digital devices and those can securely communicate with Azure services for further processing of data. It can be vice-a-versa as well, Azure IoT can work a hub to transfer the messages from Azure backend services to the devices.

It has great scalability, the reason is multiple IoT devices can send/receive millions of messages per second. Azure IoT hub is meant for this too to handle the millions of messages per second for IoT workloads.

Integration - The beauty of Azure IoT hub is it can easily integrate with other cloud services. If you see the insight block of IoT image then it shows once message is pushed from Azure IoT hub then it will go to next executions for data transformation, streaming, etc. and this action will be performed by other Azure resources/services. These services are tightly integrated with Azure IoT hub. Few services are – Azure event grid, logic apps, Azure functions, Azure machine learning, stream analytics, etc.

Azure IoT Hub has secured communication – Azure IoT device has per-device authentication and we have full control on this. IoT provision service provisions the device to the correct IoT hub service. It supports multiple authentication types for a variety of device capabilities like SAS token-based authentication, Individual X.509 certificate, X.509 CA authentication.

Control and Configure - We can manage the digital devices connected to IoT Hub with an array of built-in functionality. Store, synchronize, and query device metadata and state information for all your devices. Set device state either per-device or based on common characteristics of devices. Automatically respond to a device-reported state change with message routing integration.

Developer Benefits - Azure IoT has supported multiple platforms includes Linux distributions, Windows, and real-time operating systems with supported languages includes C, C#, Java, Python, Node.js. Azure IoT and device SDK supports HTTPS, AMQP, AMQP over WebSockets, MQTT, MQTT over WebSockets protocols. If our solution will not use the device SDK then we can go ahead to use the MQTT v3.1.1, HTTPS 1.1, or AMQP 1.0 protocols to connect natively to your hub. Even we have a choice to create our own custom protocols by using IoT Edge, protocol gateway.

Availability – Microsoft claims 99.9% availability of Azure IoT Hub.

Quota limit - Each Azure subscription has quota limit on a per-subscription basis is 50 IoT hubs per subscription. We can increase this by contacting to Microsoft support team.

Pricing – Refer to this page

Azure IoT Hub Documentation – Refer this page

In short, Azure IoT enables highly secure and reliable communication between your IoT application and the devices it manages.

Conclusion - In this article, we have learned an overview of Azure IoT Hub. In the next article, we will see more about Azure IoT Edge. Stay tuned!