Preface

The Microsoft Azure Internet of Things (IoT) platform is a set of IoT capabilities enabling businesses to build and gain value from IoT solutions quickly and efficiently. As part of their IoT Suite, Microsoft Azure IoT services enable the customers in their IoT journey - whether they are on their journey or looking to scale their IoT solutions, transforming their digital business.

Today, developers are leveraging the power of IoT in building IoT solutions for enterprises by getting started quickly with help from Azure IoT services - a set of open source SDKs, samples, pre-configured solutions, and tools provided by Microsoft Azure.

Azure IoT Hub is an easy and secure way to connect, provision, and manage millions of IoT devices, which are continuously sending and receiving billions of messages per specified or configurable interval. IoT Hub helps the communication between IoT devices and their solutions in the cloud, allowing them to store, analyze, alert, and take action on that data in real time. IoT Hub provides secure, reliable, two-way communication - both device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device - over open protocols such as MQTT, HTTPS, and AMQPS that are commonly used in IoT scenarios.

The aim of this book is to help the developer who wants to connect devices to IoT Hub, manage the IoT Hub service itself, and integrate IoT Hub into their overall IoT solution in the cloud. It discusses how to implement secure IoT solution, and implement IoT analytics scenarios. It also dives into pre-configured solutions, followed by some real device connectivity to explore the capabilities of IoT Hub.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with the Azure IoT Platform, introduces the Microsoft Azure IoT platform, which provides device management capabilities, as well as secure and bidirectional communication between millions of devices. Azure IoT Hub is the key for building IoT solutions. The chapter will focus on the different ways to create an IoT Hub service to connect devices. It will also dive more into the Azure IoT SDK and how the pricing works for Azure IoT Hub.

Chapter 2, Introducing Device Management, explains that a crucial part of IoT is to manage the device. Azure IoT Hub provides standard device management capabilities. With this feature synchronization between devices, updating metadata and executing actions are easy to implement for a developer. This chapter's focus will be to explain how to do device management with Azure IoT Hub, device communication operation, update device metadata, and execute commands.

Chapter 3, IoT Hub Messaging and Commands, describes the secure messaging between the connected device and IoT Hub. The chapter shows how to send an IoT device-to-cloud messages and receive cloud-to-device messages. It also shows how to ingest the file by uploading it to storage and updating device firmware remotely.

Chapter 4, Azure IoT Communication Protocols, focuses on the way IoT devices communicates with the cloud using various protocols. We will look at different recipes that show the different communication protocols IoT Hub supports and how we can connect these IoT devices to IoT Hub.

Chapter 5, Azure IoT Hub Security and Best Practices, dives more into IoT Hub concept such as securing and following best security practices. This chapter covers the different security standard supported by IoT Hub and how your IoT solution can make use of them to build a secure platform for connected devices.

Chapter 6, IoT Suite and Pre-Configured Solutions, discusses building common IoT scenarios quickly and going live with these solutions. Microsoft Azure IoT Suite is IoT Hub with a combination of commonly used cloud services such as storage, stream analytics, and visualizations using Power BI. It provides an example for each plugin by highlighting the requirements for each setup.

Chapter 7, Azure IoT Analytics, discusses the Azure services, which in conjunction with IoT Hub help businesses to drive their objectives. With connected devices, some significant challenges are seen with the diverse data volume and variety. This chapter covers the different Azure analytics services, that works with IoT Hub and help businesses to achieve their outcomes.

Chapter 8, Using Real Devices to Connect and Implement Azure IoT Hub, discusses how to configure and connect a real device with IoT Hub. This chapter covers a real-world case study and shows how it can be solved with IoT. We will discusses about reference IoT architecture, which can be built on top of the Azure platform. It also covers also connecting a Raspberry Pi device to implement a solution such as smart parking.

Chapter 9, Managing the Azure IoT Hub, dives more into the ways to manage the IoT Hub service with different tools and techniques. It starts with using the device explorer to manage the capabilities of IoT Hub, and moves onto getting diagnostic information using the Azure portal for the operational logs and metrics, which provides detailed logging of connected devices, and shows how to find solutions using debugging tools and hands-on tips.

What you need for this book

This book assumes a basic level of complete with the Microsoft Azure platform, basic knowledge of cloud computing, and knowledge of how to implement a solution on Microsoft Azure. The book will go through a IoT Hub setup on the Azure environment, which may require an understanding of C# and cloud concepts. If you have experience of Microsoft Azure Services, this is an advantage. We will be covering both the IoT services and IoT device client sides with open source SDKs from Azure IoT.

Azure IoT SDK supports C, .NET, Java, and Node.js-based development. However, this book requires that you have experience with C# and .NET.

The minimum hardware requirements are as follows:

• CPU: 4 cores
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Disk space: 80 GB

In this book, you will need the following software list:

• Visual Studio 2015
• Latest Azure SDK
• Microsoft Azure Account

Internet connectivity is required to install the necessary .NET packages and the Azure IoT SDK.

Who this book is for

This book focuses on providing essential information about the theory and application of Azure IoT Hub techniques and their applications within the context of Azure IoT development. The book is targeted towards both IoT hobbyist's developers and IT professionals who are new to Azure IoT and Microsoft Azure IoT platform. Azure IoT makes it just as approachable for a novice as a seasoned professional, helping you quickly be productive and on your way towards creating and testing IoT solutions.

For fast reading on the major components from the Microsoft Azure documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/. This covers the latest updates on Azure platform releases. This book is essentially intended for IoT developers, big data architects, cloud developers, and .NET engineers. If you are also willing to build your IoT solution on top of the Azure platform, then this book is ideal for you. If you already have a running IoT solution, this book can help to speed up with the use of IoT Hub and IoT Suite in a fast-paced way.

Sections

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

Getting ready

This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.

How to do it…

This section contains the steps required to follow the recipe.

How it works…

This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.

There's more…

This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.

See also

This section provides helpful links to other useful information for the recipe.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows:" Retrieve the device identity by deviceId."

A block of code is set as follows:

 try
 {
 device = await registryManager.GetDeviceAsync(deviceId);
 }

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

git clone https://github.com/Azure/iot-edge.git

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select Set up a new device."

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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