Microsoft Azure – Key IoT Products

Azure is a cloud service provided by Microsoft. Azure is the cloud platform that is mainly created for making all computing easier. It allows us to add cloud features to our network which makes it easier to develop. It also provides various services to the users. Here we see about the products which are mainly developed for IoT devices.

1. Azure IoT Hub
2. Azure IoT central
3. Azure IoT Edge
4. Azure Time Series Insights

1. Azure IoT Hub:

Azure IoT hub is a Platform as a service that is present in the cloud. It helps in the communication between normal devices and IoT devices. It acts as a central hub that initiates the communication of the applications and IoT devices. It can store enormous amounts of data and offers seamless connectivity. We can securely integrate it with our applications. It allows us to collect data from various devices like Raspberry PI and Arduino. The Azure IoT allows us to send up to 800 messages per day. We can register up to 500 devices in it.

Pricing:

It has two tiers for pricing basic tier and standard tier. The basic tier charges $10 for 4,00,000 messages, $50 for 60,00,00 messages and $500 for 30,00,00,000 messages. The standard tier charges. 25$ for 4,00,000 messages, $250 for 60,00,000 messages and 2500$ for 30,00,00,000 messages.

2. Azure IoT Central:

Azure IoT Central is a Software as a Service that acts as a bridge for connecting IOT devices with the cloud. It manages all the IoT devices. It is highly secured and the data is maintained safely in the cloud. The reason for moving to Azure IOT central is it reduces the need for maintenance employees for our IoT devices and security engineers since all these checks are taken care of by Azure IOT central. It also contains some predefined templates for IoT scenarios to make use of it.

Pricing:

It provides a free trial for up to 7 days. It follows the “Pay for use” model. It has three tiers. Tier 0 charges $0.08 per month for 400 messages. For tier 1, the charge is $0.40 per month for 5000 messages. Tier 2 charges $0.70 per month for 30,000 messages.

3. Azure IoT Edge:

Azure IoT Edge is another cloud service provided by Microsoft for IoT. It helps us to effectively manage and maintain the edge devices. It brings the analytical power of the cloud to the edge devices thereby reducing the latency to a greater extent. It supports various languages like C, C#, Java, Node js, and python. Since it does the analytics in the edge devices itself it greatly reduces the cost which will happen while moving the data to the cloud.

Pricing:

The Azure IoT edge is free and runs edge modules freely. But it may charge us for pre-deployment works particularly if we use machine models. But in most cases, the azure IoT edge is used with the Azure IOT hub so, the pricing depends on the usage of the Azure IoT hub.            

4. Azure Time Series Insights:

Azure Time Series Insights is a visualization tool that can be used for visualizing all IoT events at the same time by feeding IoT data. It shows us the overall view of data which helps us to identify and validate our IoT solution. It is more scalable because as the IoT data grows, this Azure Time Series Insights is provided with the capacity to hold such a huge amount of data.

Pricing:

The Azure time series has two levels of pricing as Gen1 and Gen2. Gen1 has two types of pricing S1 and S2, the charge of S1 is $150.0 for 30GB storage, the charge of S2 is $1350 for 300GB storage. For Azure time series insights Gen2, the price for the Data processing unit is $36.208, for additional data processed it charges $0.246 per GB, for metadata storage it charges $0.050 per MB.