Society connects living beings and gives them the feel of being together and connected. What if we could connect inanimate things to each other and have a meaningful barter relationship? Well internet does that for you and this process is known as Internet of Things(IoT). This article on Azure IoT will help you understand IoT in more depth and tell you how to use it on Azure Cloud platform.

This article will focus on following pointers:

What Is IoT?
What Is Azure?
Azure IoT
Demo: Creating An Azure IoT Hub
So let us get started,

What is IoT?

Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of devices connected over the internet which can sense, accumulate and transfer without any intervention by human beings.

Let us start this discussion with question as in what makes human beings feel alive? It is their ability to sense and communicate with each other. What if I say we could give this ability to inanimate objects to sense and interact with each other without any human intervention. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Well, this is what Internet of things lets you do and this very much forms the base for the same.

The fact that we have moved from traditional person to person communication to modern day ways of social media and Internet, we see a lot of data being generated these days. This means people have less time to attend this data resulting in lesser accuracy in handling and capturing this data. What if we had machines to do this for us and we could focus only tracking this data? This will surely reduce the effort and cost for the same. This approach is what eventually gave birth to Internet of Things.

So we know now what Internet of things (IoT) is? Let us move further and understand Azure and how Azure IoT makes sense.

What is Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a Microsoft cloud computing platform. It provides various cloud computing services that are highly scalable and dynamic in nature.

So what is so special about these services? Well to keep it simple. Instead of building a software from scratch where you are supposed manage and configure all the needed resources that are needed, what if you could just outsource the job of configuring your resources and also end up renting the required resources at a more affordable and optimised price, wouldn’t that be a pretty picture?

Well Microsoft Azure works like that, it is like, Power Consumption where you consume electricity and pay only for the electricity you have consumed and also let the suppliers worry about configuration and supply.

Azure IoT

By now we know what IoT is and also what Azure is? The question that lies ahead is why use Azure IoT together and what makes them a good combo. Azure provides you with productive and scalable IoT solutions. It serves the needs of both an experienced cloud developer or someone just getting started with IoT. Azure has powerful services and tools to help you develop next-generation IoT solutions.

Here is the list for the same:

To Customize solution templates for common IoT scenarios - Azure IoT solution accelerators

To Extend intelligence from the cloud to your edge devices - Azure IoT Edge

To Connect, monitor and control billions of IoT assets - Azure IoT Hub

To Create a digital model of your physical space or assets - Azure Digital Twins

To Gain insights from time-series IoT data in real time - Azure Time Series Insights

To Build and connect highly secure MCU-powered devices - Azure Sphere

To location APIs provide geospatial context to data - Azure Maps

The services mentioned above touch up on almost all the aspect that are important for implementing IoT using a cloud platform and thus is a major reason as to why Azure IoT is good and healthy IoT option.

Demo: Create An Azure IoT Hub

Before we begin, first you may want to know about Azure IoT Hub,

IoT Hub is a managed service, hosted in the cloud, that acts as a central message hub for bi-directional communication between your IoT application and the devices it manages. You can use Azure IoT Hub to build IoT solutions with reliable and secure communications between millions of IoT devices and a cloud-hosted solution backend. You can connect virtually any device to IoT Hub.

Now, let us try and create one.

Step1: For starters you need Azure free tier account. Please create one if you don’t have any.

Step2: Login to it and you would be taken to this page shown below,

Step3: Click on create a resource, go to Internet of Things and select IoT hub.

Step 4: Following window will open, fill in the details and you have an IoT hub ready to use

Source : Edureka