Azure IoT Edge with Azure DevOps — Manage Intelligent Edge Devices with Automated Pipeline

Internet of Things, aka IoT has been around since decades ago, and it is defined as a small computing devices that has the ability to transfer data over a network without human intervention (from Wikipedia).

As hardware manufacturing cost is cheaper, and cloud technologies became popular, the definition of IoT has evolved. Besides manufacturing (Industrial IoT — IIoT) or construction industry, consumer market associates IoT with “Smart Home”, any appliance that can communicate over the network, including light bulb or speakers, are considered as IoT devices.

In addition to telemetry streaming, IoT is expected to provide some sorts of intelligent capabilities as well, such as real-time analytics, AI capabilities on telemetry etc. While IoT allows us to digitize data that we wish to monitor, it also poses some challenges such as cyber security and privacy concern.

Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud, Intelligent Edge” resonates me and my customers very well, as it allows developers to bring cloud capabilities nearer to the data gravity, which helps to address privacy and network concern. In today context, an IoT devices can be as small as Raspberry Pi, or it can be as powerful as an industrial gateway server. These hardware runs a full-fledged operating system, which means that developer can potentially manage the IoT devices, just like how they manage software.