Many years ago (not so long), IT industry started increasing investments on IoT. Microsoft announced Event Hub, a message concentrator/”hub” with high volume capabilities. We could say it was Microsoft’s first PaaS IoT service in this new IoT era.
Nowadays, many other services (PaaS/SaaS) have completed the IoT family. Let us figure out who they are and what they do.
IoT Hub
Today, the main IoT PaaS service in Azure.
Role:
- device registry (identity and security)
- device to cloud communication
- cloud to device communication
- IoT solutions entry point at cloud level
Event Hub
PaaS Service
Role:
- Message oriented hub
- High volume capabilities
- Parallelization
Note: usually used behind IoT Hub
IoT Suite
IoT Suite does not exist anymore. It has been replaced by renamed into “IoT Solution Accelerator”.
IoT Solution Accelerator
As its name points out, it is an accelerator for IoT Solutions:
- instantiates main Azure services for an IoT project
- configure them to make them ready to use
- different templates are available
- builds an operational but “empty” shell as an starting point for building more complete solutions
NOTE: for now, I have never used it in real world projects because of specific requirements “hard” to fulfill with IoT Solution Accelerator templates. This being said, the concept is interesting and deserves to keep it in mind when it comes to designing IoT architectures. In some cases, it could represent a good first step.
IoT Central
IoT SaaS solution completely packaged:
- completely functional and ready to use
- black box and closed (no customization or integration APIs….for now)
NOTE: could be very useful for very fast PoCs or very simple projects. The cost has to be taken into consideration.
The solution is not ready yet for real world IoT projects.
IoT Edge
After build cloud-centric solutions (Intelligent Cloud approach), Microsoft decided to “export” intelligence and bring it to the edge (Intelligent Edge), closer to devices. This brings new capabilities and enrich functional scenarios.
IoT Edge is the solution making that possible. It is based on containerization (Docker or Balena, a Moby-based container engine for IoT).
The approach is quite smart and even if it requires devices with minimum hardware requirements, it opens the doors to very rich functional scenarios.
Types of modules that can be deployed on IoT Edge:
- Azure Functions
- Machine Learning
- Stream Analytics
- Cognitive Services
For more details about how IoT Edge runtime works, follow this link.
IoT, Azure, .NET, DevOps and architecture 