It is a managed IoT Service hosted on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform that acts as a central hub for bi-directional messaging between all connected devices and the Applications running on cloud or on the IoT Devices. Azure IoT Hub is a highly scalable service that can be used to orchestrate a few thousands to millions of devices while securing their inter-communication. It supports communication both ways from device to cloud and cloud to the device. It also supports telemetry messages via messaging queues, file upload from devices and request-reply methods to control the connected devices from the cloud. It also enables the administrator to monitor the health of the entire solution by tracking discrete events such as Device creation, device failures and device connections to the cloud.
Azure IoT Hub
Device Authentication:
- SAS token-based authentication to quickly get started with the IoT Solution. This token is generated using a specific concatenated String using Primary Access Keys provided by Azure whose String order is dictated and controlled by the Microsoft Azure platform.
- Individual X.509 certificate authentication for secure, standards-based authentication.
- X.509 CA authentication for simple, standards-based enrolment.
Integration with other Azure services:
- Azure makes it easy and seamless to integrate IoT Hub with other services to extend the functionality and build a robust solution with end-to-end functionalities quickly.
- Azure Event Grid can be integrated with IoT Hub to allow the business to react quickly in case of critical events swap devices in case of device failure in a reliable, scalable and secure manner.
- Automate business processes and create automated workloads by integrating with Azure Logic Apps.
- Azure Machine Learning can be integrated to add Machine Learning capabilities and to train AI models and utilize them in the solution.
- Azure Stream Analytics can be integrated to perform real-time computation and generate analytical data on the data being streamed from millions of devices.
Protocol Support:
A typical http secure protocol-based communication over the web.
Advanced Message Queuing Protocol is a better version of MQTT with a tiny overhead in terms of code. Has better features and AMQP also supports peer-to-peer communication with no need of a broker in the middle.
AMQP messaging by leveraging TCP underneath providing bi-directional, ordered and lossless communication.
A very light weight protocol with least overhead and complexity. Suitable for extremely low powered devices with less performance capabilities. Easy to implement.
MQTT messaging by leveraging TCP protocol underneath providing bi-directional, ordered and lossless communication.
Quotas & Limits:
Azure IoT Hub has default quota limits in place to avoid service abuse like DDoS attacks and although this may be enough to build and test an IoT Solution but will not be enough to deploy an enterprise level IoT Solution for customers. Currently, on a per-subscription basis we are limited to creating 50 IoT Hubs and 1,000,000 devices can be connected to a single IoT Hub. This throttling limit can be extended by contacting support.
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