This post was co-authored by Nicole Berdy, Program Manager II, Azure IoT. 

The Internet of Things (IoT) is providing new opportunities for businesses to improve operations, become more efficient at what they do, and create new revenue streams. We believe the IoT starts with your things, where your things are what matter most to your business. To help the customers get the most out of the IoT, Microsoft introduced the Azure IoT Suite and public preview of Azure IoT Hub last fall.

On February 4, we announced the general availability of the Azure IoT Hub. This service provides capabilities for securely connecting, provisioning, updating and sending commands to devices. IoT Hub enables companies to jumpstart their IoT projects by controlling millions of IoT assets running on a broad set of operating systems and protocols.

IoT Hub has some exciting new features in addition to the rich feature set debuted in public preview. General availability brings the following functionalities:

• Bulk device identity import/export: Allows you to bulk import device identities into an IoT Hub’s device registry, or export the list of devices to import into another IoT Hub for failover.
• Operations monitoring: Allows users to monitor the status of operations on their IoT Hub real-time, across four categories: device identity operations, device telemetry, cloud-to-device commands, and connections.
• Diagnostic metrics: This feature is part of an Azure-wide metrics push to provide you better data on the state of the Azure resources in your subscription. Metrics allow you to assess the overall health of your IoT Hub and the devices connected to it.
• Native support for MQTT: Azure IoT SDKs (or OSS libraries) can now connect to IoT Hub using the MQTT 3.1.1 protocol, no protocol gateway needed! You can still use the protocol gateway to support custom protocols.
• AMQP over WebSockets: You can now use the AMQP protocol in scenarios where firewall requirements previously blocked AMQP use.
• Availability in three new regions: In addition to the original three regions (East Asia, East US and North Europe), IoT Hub is now available in Southeast Asia, West Europe and West US.

All of these great functionalities come in addition to the feature set release in public preview:

• Per-device authentication and secure connectivity: Each device uses its own security key to connect to IoT Hub. The application backend can individually whitelist and blacklist each device, enabling complete control over device access.
• Extensive set of device libraries: Azure IoT device SDKs are available and supported for a variety of languages and platforms such as C/C#, Java, and JavaScript.
• IoT protocols and extensibility: IoT Hub provides native support of the HTTP 1.1 and AMQP 1.0 protocols for device connectivity.
• Scale: IoT Hub scales to millions of simultaneously connected devices and millions of events per second.

Learn about the technical functionality of IoT Hub in the IoT Hub developer guide or Azure.com documentation. Build your IoT knowledge base to make the right choices for your project with IoT technologies and protocols. Head to the Azure portal to get started building your own IoT solutions using Azure IoT Hub.