A few months ago, we released a significant update to the Azure IoT Reference Architecture, a downloadable resource that aims to accelerate customers building IoT solutions on Azure by providing a proven production ready architecture and technology implementation choices.
Today, we are happy to release updated version 2.1 of the Azure IoT Reference Architecture. The document offers an overview of the IoT space, recommended subsystem factoring for scalable IoT solutions, prescriptive technology recommendations per subsystem, and detailed sections that explore use cases and technology alternatives.
This latest version of the guide includes four essential updates:
- Guidance to build IoT solutions by leveraging SaaS (Azure IoT Central), PaaS (Azure IoT solution accelerators), or IaaS (using OSS stack). Azure IoT Central is a fully managed global IoT SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution that makes it easy to connect, monitor, and manage your IoT assets at scale. Azure IoT solution accelerators are open source offerings that provide end to end examples showcasing the use of Azure technologies to achieve faster time to market and time to value.
- Incorporating Azure IoT Edge as the intelligent edge for expanding the set of connected devices that gather telemetry, generate insights, and take action based on information close to the physical world. Azure IoT Edge helps deliver cloud intelligence locally by deploying and running Azure services securely on connected or disconnected IoT devices.
- Guidance to build appropriate logging and monitoring in IoT solutions to determine the overall health. Logging and monitoring systems assist with understanding if the solution, related devices, and systems are functioning to meet business and customer expectations. Azure Operations Management Suite (OMS) helps administrators to manage their intelligent edge and cloud environments more efficiently by giving them greater visibility into their operational infrastructure.
- Included Azure Time Series Insights (TSI) as a recommended storage subsystem. TSI capabilities include SQL-like filtering, aggregation, REST query APIs, and a data explorer to visualize information.
Customers can use the Azure IoT Reference Architecture as well as reference architecture implementations, such as Remote Monitoring and Connected Factory solution accelerators to guide their implementation choices.
We’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions based on your experience with building production IoT solutions with Azure. We are planning consistent updates to the reference architecture over the coming months so please email us at AzureIoTRefArcVoice@microsoft.com with your feedback.