We just stumbled about some quite interesting new showcases in the Industrial Azure IOT space that demonstrate quite good the bandwidth of different services leveraged in Azure ranging from operating IOT devices in the field to using AI and Machine learning creating new and innovative products by turning Big Data into Smart Data.
Festo for example, uses Azure IOT to create dashboards providing insight on all their deployed industrial IOT devices.
When implementing telemetry solutions with mobile systems, network latency can be a quite limiting factor. Communication retries are costly and also hinder a system to provide a real-time view on the current state.
To mitigate this risk you now are able to leverage Azure Edge Zones! Microsoft is teaming up with some Telcos leveraging the new 5G to provide a fast lane into Azure data centers.
This is approach, combining all the newest technologies, is able to provide ultra-low latency in the area of milliseconds response times. Especially looking at older mobile connections this is a performance gain in more than an order of magnitude and a great enabler, if your solution requires to be as close to reality as possible.
It is certainly also interesting to mention that this technology is also available for on-premise solutions, keeping the same APIs and services. Due this your solution can be ready for any network scenario.
We are very happy to announce that Wechsler Consulting has joined the OPC Foundation as a corporate member.
The OPC Unified Architecture communication standard has been tremendously successful over the last years in the industrial automation space, but has a lot of beneficial functionality to offer for other vertical markets, as well.
Complete and seamless interoperability between devices is definitely the goal, when a company is transforming its business digitally and OPC UA is providing all to be a great asset in this context.
We at Wechsler Consulting are supporting our customer’s efforts with architectural consulting and training. Being a corporate member in the OPC Foundation standards body enables us to be on top of the newest developments and decisions for this very capable and efficient communication standard.
Due to this, we will be able to apply these, as fast as possible, in real world projects.
We have already started working on an “Getting Started” online course to help interested customers to jump start their OPC UA project.
The currently available course preview is free and gives a first glimpse, on what is to expect, laying the groundwork to be successful with OPC Unified Architecture.
This is the third episode in our Wechsler Consulting Cloud News Channel talking about newest developments in Cloud and Azure IOT.
Please find the resource links from the video below.
Azure Talk
.NET 5 Preview 1
Microsoft is currently really pushing the envelope with its secure IOT connectivity and management solution Azure Sphere. Olivier Bloch and Caitie McCaffrey explain how the Security Service is used for on-boarding and updating devices in the episode below.
This is all quite exiting, because the infrastructure provided is great and can be used to register devices securely, but also to distribute OS as well as application updates.
However, it is early and the user interface is well, an API. You can either leverage the CLI version or a REST API to be called from your management solution.
This is great for the start, but as an IOT device manufacturer/end-user a device management SaaS offering related to Azure Sphere (can we call it Intune for devices?), would certainly have the potential to become a game changer in the IOT market.
Live can be challenging as JavaScript developer and debugging and searching through log files is painful!
Especially minified Javascript or node.js library path names are hard to decipher in a log stream.
Due to this, the newest feature to un-minify these entries, to make these minifies sections human readable, is an absolute productivity boost, while debugging Javascript applications in Azure Monitor.
Good job Azure Monitor Team!
We already have been talking about Azure Sphere in our recent posts and a Cloud News video earlier this year.
Seems like momentum is building up around this very interesting technology, as Swiss company qiio presents the first Azure Sphere guardian module having mobile (up tp 4G), WiFi and Ethernet connectivity options.
This is definitely an important step for the Azure Sphere eco-system, as seamless connectivity is the essential ingredient for any innovative IOT scenario.
For more infos on the device visit: https://www.qiio.com/
Cosmos DB is a document based database, which is a great asset especially for high-performance, high-availability solutions. If you have not done so, you should try out multi-master mode. It is a reliable solution to get rid of synchronization headaches by clicking a check mark to sync data between Azure regions.
There are interesting features now newly available for Cosmos as Scott Hanselmann and Kirill Gavrylyuk show in this Azure Friday episode.
A new free tier is introduced, an automatic scaling feature called Autopilot
and a 33% discount for multi-master accounts are announced, as well (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/cosmos-db-multi-master-promo/).
The first two features are in pre-view, while the discount is valid right away.
Important to know is that existing Cosmos DB accounts cannot yet be used to leverage the new features, due to the fact that the new stuff is limited to new accounts, yet.
Obviously, this is going to change with GA. Autopilot RU cost rates are also a bit higher than normal ones, but you still should be able to be better off looking at the weekly or monthly average , if your application’s DB usage is not constantly spiking.
As a former Windows Embedded Standard expert and former embedded MVP, I watched the most recent episode of the IOT Show by Olivier Bloch on Channel 9 with quite some interest.
Seems like Yocto is filling the large gap, Windows Embedded Standard, as a configurable operating system for IOT devices, had left for Microsoft customers.
With access to source one certainly gains some flexibility, but in normal project life build times matter and the construction kit approach of WES is, even today, not easy to match.
However, it is great to see that there is a configurable OS solution out there, which is supported to some extent and with IOT Edge by Microsoft.
Containerization, somehow, made the underlying OS commodity, anyway.
In any case, I want to recommend the IOT Show as a great source of information on the newest development in Azure IOT as well as Microsoft IOT efforts! Olivier is a great host and his guests are explaining complex stuff the easy way.
This is the second episode in our Wechsler Consulting Cloud News Channel talking about newest developments in Cloud and Azure IOT.
Please find the resource links from the video below.
Azure Talk
Azure Sphere is now generally available (GA) !
https://wechsler-consulting.cloud/2020/02/21/azure-sphere-update-20-01-released/
BMW and Microsoft have started Open Manufacturing Platform initiative
https://www.bmwgroup.com/de/innovation/unternehmen/open-manufacturing-cloud.html
https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T0305773EN?language=en
App Configuration GA
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-configuration/
Azure API Management provides extension for App Services
https://azure.github.io/api-management-resources/
Azure IOTHub Device Streaming
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-hub/iot-hub-device-streams-overview
Azure Eventgrid on IOT Edge
EventGrid support in IOT Edge preview 2
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-grid/edge/overview
Cloud Events
https://cloudevents.io/