Many of us remember Windows Plug & Play and we certainly have some painful memories with it, especially originating in its early years.
However, over time and with a lot of sweat and tears from the Microsoft product group, it evolved into a cool and robust feature of the Windows OS that has made the life of many IT-Professionals easier.

The exciting news is that Plug & Play is now coming to Azure IoT!

I am really thrilled about its capabilities! It is a new feature and therefore, yes, there will be some rough edges to expect as well as occasionally missing tool support along the journey, but as an IoT Architect, I would call this a very promising approach to tackle the device provisioning problem, we have in every solution.
There are communication technologies available that try to manage this problem on company network level (such as e.g. OPC UA), but none of these have been able to develop a sound Cloud-native strategy, yet.
The Plug & Play deep integration into Azure services such as IOTHub and Digital Twins has the potential to develop into a killer feature!

There is a great and detailed video by Olivier Bloch and Stefan Wick on the Azure IOT Show.

To me, this is just the beginning and I am looking forward to see more interesting developments around IoT Plug & Play happening in the following months.
I can see room for a lot of IoT development process enhancements, modelling tools, solutions templates, to name just a few of the possible fields of innovation!

Alexander