Microsoft has announced the IoT Central, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering to ‘reduces the complexity of internet of things solutions. A preconfigured IoT solution, providing plug and play connectivity from OPC UA and classic devices into the Azure cloud, was unveiled at Hannover Messe earlier this year. Another IoT novelty from Microsoft is Azure Time Series Insights, an analytics, storage and visualization service for billion-event scale cloud data. Azure Stream Analytics for edge devices makes it possible to perform streaming analytics ‘at the device level.’
Poster child for Microsoft’s Azure IoT is long time partner and oil country software house Quorum. Quorum reports that today’s ‘the rate of innovation far exceeds what traditional technology infrastructure can handle.’ Cloud computing is imperative to achieving IoT scalability. Quorum has retooled its oil and gas field operations toolset to run as service (but not a ‘microservice!’) in the Azure cloud.
If you fancy taking the IoT for a test spin, the June 2017 issue of Microsoft DevNet Magazine provides step by step instructions for deploying Microsoft’s IoT solution to for remote monitoring and predictive maintenance with using a DIY testbed comprising a USB camera, a Raspberry Pi device* running the Windows 10 IoT Core OS and controlled from a remote Windows workstation.
* A bare-bones computer for enthusiasts that usually runs a Linux-based OS.
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