The reference IoT lifecycle aims to be neutral about any industries and use case scenarios and also neutral towards approaches for solutions and the behavior of devices. However, while the reference IoT lifecycle is abstract, the assumption is that realizations of the IoT solutions will be very concrete and aligned with industry standards or domain-specific design needs.

The reference IoT lifecycle provides flexibility for composability and extensibility to allow for a variety of technology choices driven by the specific solution requirements provided by the Microsoft Azure platform. The lifecycle also introduces foundational principles for the reference architecture, then presents the conceptual model and components of the IoT solution architecture, which can be implemented using the Azure platform:

The preceding image shows the high-level conceptual IoT lifecycle. The Azure IoT lifecycle is composed of the Azure core platform services and the application-level components to facilitate end-to-end solution needs across three major areas of a typical IoT solution.