Introduction to Azure IoT Hub
IoT isn't anything new, in fact it's been something companies have been doing since before it was named IoT. So you might wonder, if it's not new, then why all the hype? It's a good question and the answer is complex. However these days there are a few things that have enabled IoT to take off. The internet is ubiquitous and reasonably inexpensive, makeing it easy to get devices online. The cloud is another enabler, and it's an important one, because it's helped to make it possible for individuals to do things that were once cost prohibitive. Another enabler is hardware devices such as the Raspberry Pi or Arduino. These boards make it easy for just about anyone with $40 to start prototyping.
Since the cloud is a major enabler of IoT, it's no surprise that cloud vendors are creating their own IoT solutions. Azure has a lot to offer in the IoT world, and one of the services is IoT Hub. IoT Hub is a services that provides a device registry as well as mechanisms for cloud-to-devices and device-to-cloud communication.
This course is intended to help get you up to speed on using Azure IoT Hub, and in particular, with the IoT Hub SDKs.
Getting Started With Azure IoT Hub: What You'll Learn
| Lecture | What you'll learn |
|---|---|
| Course Intro | What to expect from this course |
| Introductio to IoT Hub | A high level overview of what Azure IoT Hub is, and its basic capabilities |
| Devices and Developers | What are devices |
| Device Management | The IoT Hub Devices Registry |
| Device to Cloud | Device to cloud messages |
| Device to Cloud - Part 2 | Endpoints and file uploads |
| Cloud to device | Sending messages to devices from IoT Hub |
| Device Configuration | Configuring device state, and invoking messages |
| Next Steps | What's next |
The source code for this course can be downloaded from Github
If you have thoughts or suggestions for this course, please contact Cloud Academy at support@cloudacademy.com.
Welcome to introduction to Azure IoT Hub.
My name is Ben Lambert, and I’ll be narrating the course for the author Marco Parenzan.
In this course we’ll be covering some of the features of IoT Hub as well as how to communicate with IoT Hub from the device SDKs. Between the SDKs, and messaging functionality, IoT Hub can simplify the development of IoT solutions.
Since the focus of this course is on IoT Hub and the SDKs, we’re not going to be using real devices. Instead we’ll use devices simulators built around the device SDK. Though in future courses we’ll use a Raspberry Pi and Arduino.
This course was created with developers in mind, and focuses heavily on code. So if you’re looking for a higher level overview, then this isn’t the right course for you.
While the majority of the course is going to cover IoT Hub, I’ll also be using Azure Storage, Azure Functions and DocumentDB at different points throughout.
I’m not going to focus on these additional services, however if you’re looking to learn more about them, feel free to check out some of the other courses that cover them.
For this course, I’ll be using Visual Studio 2015, and C#.
If you're not a Visual Studio or C# developer, as long as you have some development experience, you should be able to intuit what’s happening in code.
If you want to send me some feedback, you can reach me in a couple ways.
You can reach me on the community forum; you can contact me via email at info@cloudacademy.com. Also, I am @marco_parenzan on Twitter.
I love getting feedback, both positive and negative because every comment helps me creating better content for you.
So I hope to hear from you.
Alright, if you are ready to learn about IoT Hub in Azure, let's get started with the first lesson.
Marco Parenzan is a Research Lead for Microsoft Azure in Cloud Academy. He has been awarded three times as a Microsoft MVP on Microsoft Azure. He is a speaker in major community events in Italy about Azure and .NET development and he is a community lead for 1nn0va, an official Microsoft community in Pordenone, Italy. He has written a book on Azure in 2016. He loves IoT and retrogaming.