Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Microsoft Azure IoT hub vs AWS IoT

The enormous cloud duo have entered the Internet of Things (IoT) space. Each one is offering new services and investing in their IoT platforms. The smart cities will have a strong effective future in which IoT and analytics plays an important role in both private and public services. Let us compare Microsoft Azure IoT hub vs AWS IoT.
Microsoft’s cloud solution is Microsoft Azure. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the public cloud leader.
Microsoft Azure IoT vs AWS IoT

What is IoT?

IoT is an abbreviation of Internet of Things. It refers to the continuous growing network of physical objects that feature an IP address for internet connectivity. It also feature the communication that occurs between these objects and other Internet-enabled devices and systems. Microsoft Azure IoT and AWS IoT are the most famous IoT services among all. IoT has a potential to manage lighting, parking, waste management. Smart city revolution is about connecting people, process, data and things through technology to enable more efficient, smarter living. IoT has potential to develop cities with technology.

Microsoft Azure IoT-

Microsoft’s cloud solution is Microsoft Azure. It offers a substantial number of cloud services, including mobile app services, storage offerings, messaging platforms and virtual machines. It enables not only reliable but also secure bi – directional communication between millions of IoT devices and a solution back end. Azure Con 2015 launched Azure IoT on Sept 29, 2015. It offers plenty of products targeted for use in IoT product development. According to price, Azure IoT is cheaper than AWS IoT platforms.

Features of Azure IoT-

Azure IoT Hub –

IoT Hub also supports numerous open- source SDKs, including .NET, Javascript, Java, C and Python. IoT Hub is the focal territory for developers to develop IoT applications and to connect, monitor and also to analyze. It can manage billions of edge devices with the help of bi – directional messaging. It is a flexible cloud platform as a service (PaaS) that supports multiple protocols (AMPQ, MQTT and HTTP). If a device does not support any one of these protocols then incoming and outgoing traffic can be adjusted using the Azure IoT protocol gateway.
Some of the central features include the use of authentication control per device, bidirectional communication between IoT devices using device- to- cloud telemetry data, and the ability to accelerate the deployment and scaling of IoT services by registering and provisioning devices using zero touch. It allows developers to pack their cloud workloads and run them locally on devices using Azure IoT edge. According to prize, it is grouped into 4 categories including free tiers which has up to the high throughput S3 tier, capable of  supporting up to 300,000,000 messages per day. Each tier added by extra units for more throughput. Messages are sent in 4 KB blocks, for billing purposes. A message upto max 512 KB is count as each block.

Azure IoT Edge –

IoT Edge stretches cloud intelligence and analytics to edge devices at a local level. It expands the deployment of AI, Azure services, and custom logic directly to cross-platform IoT devices. With AWS, the IoT when deployed via Azure IoT Edge can run securely and efficiently even when the devices are offline. IoT Edge has extremely low latency and near real-time response potential, thereby optimizing performance between edge and cloud. It works with the AI Toolkit for Azure IoT Edge. This means that, complex AI and ML tasks such as image recognition and complex event processing can easily run without the need to write them in-house. One of the biggest risks for both customers and enterprises is to secure the data. Hence, Azure has consistently been at the forefront of cyber-security as compared to AWS.

Azure IoT central-

Azure IoT Central is built on the enterprise- grade Azure services that allow integration with existing business processes and systems. It is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) for IoT. And also is a fully managed solution. This means is that, the users without any coding or development skills can build production-grade IoT applications. It is very quick to deploy production-grade IoT applications and ensures to eliminate the need for management of infrastructure and hiring developers with specific skills.This makes Azure IoT Central one of the best platforms for IoT development. It is operated with an interface that allows developers to connect, manage and control access to millions of connected products remotely across their entire life-cycle.

Azure IoT Solution Accelerators –

It is a customizable set of templates for common IoT scenarios such as remote monitoring, a connected factory and predictive maintenance. There is a connected device simulation accelerator, which allows developers to test- run their chosen IoT solution with tens of thousands of simulated devices over the development cycle.

AWS IoT-

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the public cloud leader and it has been putting a lot of effort into cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT for a long time now. It provides IoT services through its AWS IoT platform, which comes with a broad set of tools. It offers many solutions that span edge to the cloud, allow developers for most of the use cases over a wide range of devices. These solutions consist of local data collection and analysis, devices and cloud services to store and analyze device data.
The AWS IoT stage is more costly than its adversaries, however in general, AWS is essentially in ahead of the others in terms of market share of the cloud computing space. Devices can communicate with applications running in the cloud over HTTP, MQTT and also WebSockets. This communication can secured with the use of TLS. Device specific SDKs are available for Embedded C, JavaScript, Python, iOS, Android and Arduino Yun. Device shadow is a device that connects with AWS. It maintains the identity and last known state of a specific device and acts as a channel to send and receive messages.

AWS IoT Services-

Amazon FreeRTOS –

Amazon FreeRTOS is a microcontroller operating system. This focuses on allowing easy programming and management of small, low-power edge devices. It is based on the FreeRTOS kernel, an open source operating system for microcontrollers. AWS’ service extends the free version with software libraries which allows easy connections between small and low-power devices (such as appliances, fitness trackers and automobiles) with AWS’ wider set of cloud services, such as AWS IoT Core or to other bigger edge devices running AWS Greengrass.
Microcontrollers (MCUs) are single chips consisting of a simple processor. They have limited memory capacity and compute power and so they can only perform simple, functional tasks. Generally microcontrollers can not run on operating systems with built in functionality to connect to the cloud or local networks. This makes IoT services more challenging. Amazon FreeRTOS was built to solve this problem by allowing to connect the core operating system with software libraries. It makes a secure connection to the cloud easy.

AWS Greengrass –

It is software that securely allows the running of local compute, data caching and messaging for connected devices. Connected devices can run AWS Lambda functions via AWS Greengrass. It also enables the keeping of device data in synchronized and securely communicating with other devices even though not connected to the internet.  This means that Greengrass connected IoT devices can still respond quickly to local events, interact with local resources (via Lambda functions), stay updated and minimize the costs associated with transmitting IoT data to the cloud. Devices can then act locally on the data they are generating in addition to using the cloud for backup storage, management and analytics.

AWS IoT Core –

It is AWS’ overseen cloud stage that allows the clear and secure interaction between connected devices, cloud applications and other devices, the thought being to permit the simple structure of IoT applications, for example, associated home or industrial solutions. Also, IoT Core has the functionality to support billions of devices and trillions of messages. This also includes the processing and routing of those messages to AWS endpoints and other devices. IoT Core also connects to AWS IoT Analytics, which empowers the building of analytics and machine learning models.

Final Words-

The IoT market will grow over the years, and demand for IoT developers and IoT development services will also increase. There are various IoT technologies and platforms are available to build IoT projects. Therefore, it becomes complicated for developers and enterprises to select the best one. So we have compared the AWS IoT and Azure IoT to make things easier.
If you’re interested in migrating to the cloud, then we’re more than happy to help you get started. Solace is there to help you for cloud platform. We believe in benefits of using Microsoft azure and AWS IoT. We will provide the means to bring your company the success it deserves. Contact us for incorporating azure or AWS in a business.

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