At Microsoft, we believe the edge of the network plays a critical role in IoT, not only in IoT devices themselves but also in intermediate field gateways. Earlier this year, we announced the open source Azure IoT Gateway SDK, our approach to accelerating the development of IoT edge scenarios such as supporting legacy devices, minimizing latency, conserving network bandwidth, and addressing security concerns. Since then, we’ve been busy improving and enhancing our SDK completely out in the open.
Today, we are happy to announce an exciting new capability we’ve added to the IoT Gateway SDK: Support for Azure Functions. With Azure Functions integration, developers can easily call cloud-based logic from their IoT gateway. Just write an Azure Function and you can quickly call it from a Function Module in the Azure IoT Gateway SDK.
For example: if something goes wrong in your field gateway environment, such as local devices that can’t connect or misbehave, and you want to upload diagnostic information to your Azure IoT solution for inspection by operations, our new Functions integrations makes this simple. Just create an Azure Function that takes this data, stores it and alerts operations – and then call it from your gateway running the Azure IoT Gateway SDK when you encounter a problem.
The Azure IoT Gateway SDK supports everything from low-level modules written in C to connect the broad variety of deployed devices, to high level modules for productivity such as our new Azure Functions support. The best part of the Azure IoT Gateway SDK is how easy it is to chain these modules together to create reusable processing pipelines that suit your needs.
We’ve already seen some great success stories from businesses benefitting from our approach to edge intelligence, and we’re looking forward to seeing what our customers and partners will create with this exciting new capability.
