Microsoft's Azure - Anyone using this???

[NW27]

Hi All,

I'm creating a IoT device that will need to connect to the cloud for data storage.
I'm looking at using Microsoft's Azure and an SQL database.

Anybody else do this that can ease my learning curve a bit ?

Thanks,
Neril.

[Fred27]

Three documentation on Azure is very good. Take a look at Microsoft's examples.

[obiwanjacobi]

Let your device call a function with the payload.
The function can then connect to the SQL db and transform and store the data.

If you use something like Table storage, it is way cheaper. An Azure SQL DB is not cheap.
Table storage can also be called directly.

[2c]

[tszaboo]

You need some service running on the server, that acts like the endpoint for the communication. Like an MQTT broker. That places the data in the SQL database.  Stuff like this:
http://www.steves-internet-guide.com/logging-mqtt-sensor-data-to-sql-database-with-python/

The Azure server can be just a VM, doing the computing, or you can have just a database access, running on the cloud. One way, you are basically a sysadmin of the VM, and you can just develop the thing on a local linux machine, and then place it on the cloud. This can be easy to set up and develop, and then depending on your requirements, could be enough for years.
And then you can ask them to "give me a database", and they can take care of everything. Could cost more, but if you suddenly end up with 50 million users, you dont have to worry about database scaling. If you dont expect that, just buy a VM. Or you know, several VMs all doing different parts of the entire back/frontend. Whatever makes sense.

[obiwanjacobi]

Azure is most effective if you use its PaaS services. So trying to do it yourself in a VM is 'suboptimal'.

You can get an idea what it'll cost you here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/

[ehughes]

Look into Azure IOT Hub.   It has front end interfaces for MQTT, AMPQ and HTTPS  for ingesting data with a security model ready to go.  I believe there is already event triggers to get data directly into a DB.    You can also have an Azure function triggered (which can be written in C#, javascript or python) to deal with the ingestion.

I have been using Redis quite a bit for caching data before going to a cold storage DB.

If you are recording TimeSeries data,   a SQL DB is often the worst way to store data.     Since almost all data will be inserts,  you need to be smart about partitioning if you plan to scale.    A transitional RDBMS stores data in a way that is not conducive to scaling time series data. (Related to the be b-tree).    If you are staying in Azure,  Looking in Cosmos or Azure tables.    I saw a 10x performance increase for an equivalently priced service.        The key is to 1st understand how you plan to partition, store and query your data. The DB technology will follow suite.

Technologies suchas InfluxDB do a good job for storing time series.   If this is a one-off then forget everything I just said and get it work anyway you can.  If this has a any scale factor (i.e. thousands of devices) then you need to think about this ahead of time.

[Scrts]

I wonder if anyone used MS Azure with embedded application? E.g. using ARM micro + WiFi or 3G connection?  I saw some examples based on Raspberry Pi, but limited on embedded solutions. 3G/4G becomes even more challenging, since not all modules support secure connections.

[Fred27]

It might be worth taking a look at Azure Sphere if you want to push data to Azure. It's a bit quirky getting started as you need to think about security and ownership right from the beginning.

[Scrts]

It might be worth taking a look at Azure Sphere if you want to push data to Azure. It's a bit quirky getting started as you need to think about security and ownership right from the beginning.

That seems to run on MediaTek chips. Not really embedded solution... I'd rather then use FreeRTOS and Amazon AWS.

[ehughes]

I am pushing to Azure from a bare metal Cortex M4 over a CAT M1 cellular connection.

You can use WolfSSL for setting up TLS connections.

[eb4eqa]

Hi,

You can talk to IoT Hub as you would talk to any MQTT Broker, connecting with SAS token or with x509 certificates for authentication. See the docs here:

Communicate with your IoT hub using the MQTT protocol
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-hub/iot-hub-mqtt-support

I would advice you to learn how to interact with IoT Hub using a MQTT client like MQTTFX, and move to the ARM once you know well what you need to do.

There are tutorials for ESP32, which could help you understand the requirements:

Azure ESP32 IoT DevKit Get Started:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/samples/azure-samples/esp32-iot-devkit-get-started/sample/

And lots of examples and code in GitHub, take a look and see what is of most help to you:
https://github.com/Azure/iot

Roberto EB4EQA

[olkipukki]

Microsoft's Azure - Anyone using this???

Not any more 

Back up your data while there’s still time

You’re receiving this email because you cancelled your Azure subscription...

  

[Scrts]

Microsoft's Azure - Anyone using this???

Not any more 

Back up your data while there’s still time

You’re receiving this email because you cancelled your Azure subscription...

  

And where did you migrate to? Azure seems to offer a good free tier...

[filssavi]

Don’t try and count on the free tier as they are usually designed to lure you in with just enough functionality to get you started but not enough to be useful, so you will end up paying in one form or the other (the usual traps are DNS, inbound/outbound bandwidth etc.).

Also set up quotas, limits and reporting/cost monitoring, as it is really easy to fall victim of the slashdot effect (that is when a very popular website/celebrity links your page and you rack up massive bills due to cloud auto scaling)

[olkipukki]

And where did you migrate to? Azure seems to offer a good free tier...

I used to pay for Azure. Although, some part has "subsidised" from Visual Studio subscription, still need top up for remaining.
Since VS has been cancelled, followed by Azure and Office 365, no point at all to use MS cloud

24/7 services moved to AWS into an existing stack and others - "in-house" 

[TIOUK]

Although this is an old thread, my impression when we used it for a couple of client projects, it gets expensive fast & we broke IOT Central as they had made some absurd design decisions. The only recourse in the borkage was to delete and recreate the project and scale back data points as they couldn't fix the data we had in the system already.