Before getting into Azure and its features and services related to IoT, it is important to understand various components needed to create end -to-end IoT solutions.
Imagine IoT devices across the globe sending millions of messages every second to a centralized database. Why is this data collected? This data is collected to extract rich information about events, anomalies, outliers, and happenings within those devices and objects they are connected to.
Let's understand this in more detail.
IoT architecture can be divided into distinct phases:
- Connectivity
- Identity
- Capture
- Ingestion
- Storage
- Transform
- Analytics
- Presentation
The next images show a generic IoT based architecture. Data are generated or collected by devices and send over to cloud gateways. The cloud gateway, in turn, sends the data to multiple backend services for processing. Cloud gateways are an optional component. They should be used when devices themselves are not capable of sending requests to backend services either because of their resource constraints or lack of reliable network. These Cloud gateways can collate date from multiple devices an send to backend services. Data processes by backend services are then shown as insights or dashboards to users.
