Interoperability

Microsoft Azure IoT Suite–Provisioned solutions for Faster Time to Market IoT enabled solutions

January 7, 2017 Analytics, Azure, Azure SDK, Cloud Computing, Communication Protocols, Contrained Networks/Devices, Data Collection, Data Integration, Emerging Technologies, Identity of Things (IDoT), Internet of Things, Interoperability, IoT, PaaS, Performance, Predictive Analytics, Predictive Maintenance, Realtime Analytics, Reliability, Scalability, Self Driven Cars, Solutions, Stream Analytics, Tech-Trends, Windowz Azure No comments

Microsoft Azure IoT Suite Provisioned solutions will help you create your own fully integrated solutions tailored for your specific needs in the following 3 sections. Using these ready to consume solutions will accelerate your time to market IoT(Internet of Things) requirements.

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  1. Remote Monitoring  – Connect and monitor your devices to analyze untapped data and improve business outcomes by automating processes.  For ex: As a car  manufacturing company, provide an option to customer to remotely monitor their car condition, and suggest if they need a re-fuel or oil change.
  2. Connected Factory – Anticipate maintenance needs and avoid unscheduled downtime by connecting and monitoring your devices. For ex: As a car manufacturing  factory and spare parts are essential for car manufacturing. Automated solutions can ensure timely availability of necessary spare parts inventory to meet daily, weekly or monthly manufacturing needs.
  3. Predictive Maintenance – Connect and monitor your factory industrial devices for insights using OPC UA to drive operational productivity.  For ex: As a car service support, you can get near real-time performance data from the cars manufactured by your company, predict the health of each components in a car and offer timely maintenance to their cars.  Send real-time reminders and notifications to customers. Their by ensuring higher satisfaction levels for customers and more business value to the organization as it attracts more sales and good customer feedback.

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These solutions will help you to:

  1. Connect and scale quickly – Use preconfigured solutions, and accelerate the development of your Internet of Things (IoT) solution.

  2. Analyze and process dataCollect previously untapped data from devices and sensors, and use built-in capabilities to visualize—and act on—that data.

  3. Integration and Digital TransformationEasily integrate with your systems and applications, including Salesforce, SAP, Oracle Database, and Microsoft Dynamics, making it simple to access your data and keep your disparate systems up to date.

  4. Enhanced security Set up individual identities and credentials for each of your connected devices—and help retain the confidentiality of both cloud-to-device and device-to-cloud messages.

Useful Links:

IoT Protocols–Quick Comparison

January 5, 2017 Communication Protocols, Connectivity, Contrained Networks/Devices, Internet of Things, Interoperability, IoT, Performance, Reliability, Scalability, Tech-Trends No comments

The table below contains a quick summary of the IoT protocols:

Protocol CoAP XMPP RESTful HTTP MQTT AMQP
Transport UDP TCP TCP TCP TCP
Messaging Request/Response Publish/Subscribe Request/Response Request/Response Publish/Subscribe Request/Response Topic based Publish/Subscribe
2G, 3G, 4G Suitability (1000s nodes) Excellent Excellent Excellent Excellent Excellent
LLN Suitability (1000s nodes) Excellent Fair Fair Fair Excellent
Compute Resources 10Ks RAM/Flash 10Ks RAM/Flash 10Ks RAM/Flash 10Ks RAM/Flash 10Ks RAM/Flash
Success Stories Utility Field Area Networks Remote management of consumer white goods Smart Energy Profile 2 (premise energy management, home services) Extending enterprise messaging into IoT applications Extending enterprise messaging into IoT applications
designed for resource-constrained devices and low bandwidth, high latency networks interoperability
reliable queuing, flexible routing, transactions, and security

Source: Beyond MQTT: A Cisco View on IoT Protocols, Paul Duffy, April 30 2013

IoT Hub vs Event Hub–A quick comparison

December 11, 2016 Azure, Cloud Computing, Cloud to Device, Communication Protocols, Connectivity, Contrained Networks/Devices, Data Hubs, Device Shadow, Device to Cloud, Device Twin, Emerging Technologies, Event Hubs, HTTP2, Identity of Things (IDoT), Intelligent Cloud, Internet of Things, Interoperability, IoT, IoT Hub, IoT Privacy, IoT Security, Messaging, Microsoft, Performance, Protocols, Reliability, Scalability, Tech-Trends No comments

With this article I am trying to provide you a birds eye view comparison of IoT Hub and Azure Event Hub, so that some of you may stop feeling that there is nothing new in IoT Hub.

For the interest of this article, I put together a table with side-by-side comparison of some important features/desired features from an IoT Hub like platform.

Feature IoT Hub Event Hub
Communication Supports both device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device bidirectional communication Supports only device-to-cloud communication
State Management Can maintain device state using Device Twins and query them whenever needed. Not Supported
Protocol Support AMQP 1.1, AMQP over Web Sockets, MQTT 3.2, MQTT over Web Sockets, HTTP 1.1, Web Sockets. AMQP 1.1, AMQP over Web Sockets, HTTP 11 , Web Sockets only
Protocol Extensions Provides IoT protocol gateway a customizable implementation for industrial protocol channelling. Not Supported
Security Provides identity to each device and easily revocable through IoT Hub Device Management portal. Shared access policies with limited revocation capabilities are provided.
Monitoring/ Operations Provides a rich set of features through Device Management capability. Includes individually enable/disable or provision new device. Change security keys as needed. View/identify individual device problems easily. Does not provide individual performance metrics. Can provide only a high level aggregated metrics only.
Scalability Scalable to thousands/millions of simultaneous devices Limited number of simultaneous connections up to 5000 connections per Azure Service Bus Quotas. Event Hub provides a capability to partition your message to channel it in to associated Service Bus quotas.
SDK Support/ Developer Support Provides very good Integration SDK and developer support. Both Azure IoT  Device SDK and IoT Gateway SDK are the most essential kits provided for almost all devices/OS platforms. It also support all the latest programming languages such as C#, Node.js, Java and Python.
Also provides  direct MQTT, AMQP and REST based HTTP APIs.
Very detail oriented documentation provided.
.NET, Java and C apart from protocols such as AMQP, HTTP API interfaces.
Files/Images Upload Capability Supports IoT devices/solutions to upload files/images/snapshots to cloud and define a workflow for processing them. Not Available
Message Routing Very decent message routing capability is available out of the box. Up to 10 end points can be defined and Advanced Rules can be defined on how routing should occur. Requires additional programming and hosting to support as per the need.

From this comparison table, you can analyse that IoTHub is the right candidate for your IoT solution needs, as Event Hub lacking certain capabilities that are essential for an IoT Ingestion point. If you are only requiring to send messages to cloud and doesn’t require any fancy stuff as IoTHub provides, you can choose Event Hub.

Remember with more power comes more responsibility, that’s what IotHub intend to provide to you.

Hope this overview was helpful. Please feel free to comment or initiate a discussion any time. Please share your feedbacks on this article as well.