Azure IoT Hub

When building your next Internet of Things connected device you have to start thinking about how it will communicate with the outside world. Most chips have an MQTT library, or some even have the option to plug right into AWS or Azure IoT Hubs. Regardless, the next step can cause your new product succeed or fall hard due to scaling issues.

What is Azure IoT Hub?

Azure IoT Hub is a fully managed service that enables reliable and secure bidirectional communications between millions of IoT devices and a solution back end. Azure IoT Hub:

• Provides multiple device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device communication options. These options include one-way messaging, file transfer, and request-reply methods.
• Offers built-in declarative message routing to other Azure services.
• Provides a queryable store for device metadata and synchronized state information.
• Enables secure communications and access control using per-device security keys or X.509 certificates.
• Offers extensive monitoring for device connectivity and device identity management events.
• Includes device libraries for the most popular languages and platforms.

Microsoft continues to amaze me as they grow closer to the Linux community than I ever thought they would. Overall, they have/need to, due to the lack of developer support, but that’s for another time… back to Azure IoT.

Azure IoT Hub has become one of my favorite IoT Hubs to work with, purely due to the ease of setup and configuration. I can set up an IoT Hub and connect a device with just a few spare minutes of time.

Scale

Azure’s IoT Hub can scale at the drop of a hat, allowing your product to maintain it’s lighting fast connectivity and reduce message lag. The ability to automatically scale takes the guesswork out of your human hands and puts that decision into the capable hands of Azure.

Pricing

With almost an unbeatable pricing model Azure IoT Hub is sure to fall low on the list of costs for your product. The price also depends on how much data your product sends over the connection, it can be hard to estimate usage, but the beautiful thing is that Azure is 100% affordable at almost any scale with plans starting at just $50 a month.

At Echolo, we choose the right tool for the job, and Azure IoT Hub is often the correct choice for us when working with internet connected devices.