Microsoft Announces General Availability of Azure IoT Edge

Since the introduction of Azure IoT Edge just over a year ago, there have been several examples of the real-world impact to run cloud intelligence directly on IoT devices. Now devices can act immediately on real-time data—whether it be recognizing a crack in a pipe from an aerial view or predicting equipment failure before it happens.

This continues recent momentum and news at the Build developer conference last month, where we announced new IoT Edge capabilities including integration with Microsoft AI services and container support for Kubernetes, new partnerships, and integrations with third-party hardware including DJI drones and Qualcomm vision AI developer kit at the edge.

Microsoft is introducing new robust capabilities on Azure IoT Edge to easily develop and deploy intelligence to the edge. These robust updates position Azure IoT Edge as a true end-to-end solution for enterprise-grade edge deployments:

·         Open and flexible for greater choice

o   Open source Azure IoT Edge:  IoT Edge is open sourced and available on GitHub. This continues our commitment to open source support for Azure IoT Edge and gives developers even greater flexibility and control of their edge solutions, enabling them to modify the runtime and debug issues

o   Support for Moby container management system: Moby is the open-source platform Docker is built on, allowing us to extend the concepts of containerization, isolation, and management from the cloud to devices at the edge

o   The ecosystem of certified hardware and software for the edge: Expansion of Azure Certified for IoT program to certify core edge functionalities such as device management and security. You can find already certified edge hardware on the device catalogue

·         Secure from hardware to cloud for solutions that scale

o   Azure IoT Device Provisioning Service: Azure IoT Edge now has deep integration with Device Provisioning Service for zero-touch provisioning so that a device can simply be provisioned in the field with no operator intervention. With Device Provisioning Service, customers can securely provision tens of thousands of devices – bringing true scale to edge deployments

o   Azure IoT Edge security manager acts as a well-bounded security core for protecting the IoT Edge device and all its components by abstracting the secure silicon hardware. It is the focal point for security hardening and provides Original Device Manufacturers (OEM) the opportunity to harden their devices based on their choice of Hardware Secure Modules (HSM)

o   Automatic Device Management (ADM) service allows scaled deployment of IoT Edge modules to a fleet of devices based on device metadata. When a device with the right metadata (tags) joins the fleet, ADM brings down the right modules and puts the edge device in the correct state

·         New and simplified developer experience

o   Broad language support for module SDKs: Azure IoT Edge supports more languages than other edge offerings today, including C#, C, Node.js, Python, and Java so you can program edge modules in the language of your choice

o   Tooling for VSCode: Simplify module development by coding, testing, debugging, and deploying all from VSCode

o   CI/CD pipeline with VSTS allows managing of the complete lifecycle of the Azure IoT Edge modules from development, testing, staging, and finally deployment. All of this is now possible in VSTS using tools already familiar to developers