A bunch of really great content is made available by the Azure IOT team to provide the fundamental information required working with Azure IOT. They have declared July to IOT learning month!
This sets you off to a great start and we are strongly encouraging everybody to join this effort!
If you have any more sophisticated questions or you need help with your IOT solution, we at Wechsler Consulting are always ready to help you out!
Alexander
Having your infrastructure a code in the Cloud is certainly the way to go! Unfortunately it still feels like working close to the metal in Azure. Microsoft has recognized these problems and they are striving to provide more comfort and tooling, as Mark Russinovich states in his interesting blog post to the topic.
This is great news, especially looking at the tool support with VS Code. However, in enterprise scenarios Visual Studio is still the tool of choice and could use some love here, as well. As a VS enterprise licence is not cheap, this would be well deserved.
🙂
Alexander
Quite often new and innovative solutions require at least some technical effort. IOT systems e.g. need to be deployed , calibrated, provisioned with network and power, which requires quite some effort.
Depending on the use case Live Video Analytics, a feature of Azure Media Services, might be able to reduce this effort. All you need is a camera and, ideally, an IOT Edge device connected to it. This is especially helpful in dynamic environments, such as delivery entrances, machine ports or storage racks, where a lot of different things are going on simultaneously. In these dynamic environments dedicated sensors are often hard to calibrate and locate.
Video Analytics use AI models to detect motion, things and can even go down to detecting and reading text, such as numbers on license plates, addresses on parcels, etc. .
Microsoft describes some of the interesting possibilities and scenarios quite good in this recent blog post.
What I like is that the AI video analytics models can be run on an edge device. This saves a lot of bandwidth and also keeps your eventually sensible video material on-premise! There are models available for use, but you can also build custom ones and thus create, adapt and fine tune the detection for a use case. Existing video streams also can be used for processing, which, in some cases, enables you to start right away focusing on implementing the IOT Edge solution,
As the analytics models are able to create events to be consumed by an EventHub, they can be used as a publisher of triggers to build business solutions on.
Use Azure Serverless capabilities and you have a sophisticated video analytics system for your use case up and running in days, or even only hours.
Alexander
Microsoft teams have geared up, this time, of course, virtually, to present all the newest stuff from their development repositories. Looking at Azure IOT there is quite some interesting information in the pipe.
Focus, this year, seems to be on Azure Sphere and Digital Twins, although they might come up with some new stuff, as well.
So tune in, I’ll be there. 🙂
Enterprise projects require Continous Intgration and Continous Deployment (CI/CD). In Azure DevOps this is possible, of course, but in the past it was a challenge to keep the CI/CD pipeline definition in sync with the code versions, especially across different stages/environments.
Azure pipelines with YAML CD fixes this issue, because the pipeline definition YAML file is part of a repository and now can be versioned together with the app / service / container one intends to deploy.
Any changes to the pipeline can be validated together with the rest of the codebase through the different stages. This provides absolute control and helps to avoid configuration and carry over errors between stages, quite a bit.
A very helpful and long-awaited feature!
It is essential to any solution and here is how to do it, leveraging device management capabilities in Azure IOTHub.
Olivier Bloch, a seasoned pro and developer advocate in the Azure IOT team, has created this very informative course, giving a profound introduction into the process.
Why are firmware updates so important?
Well, in a connected world, they are the delivery mechanism to bring fixes and protective settings down to an IOT device in field.
Running without this capability is like going on a sailing trip in heavy weather, without a life vest.
Basically, not a great idea! 😉
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!
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.