Roadmap of Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Edge for the future due to release of Azure IoT Operations

Question

Hello Team,

I read https://learn.microsoft.com/ja-jp/azure/iot-operations/.

I feel that Azure IoT Operations is replacement for Azure IoT Edge. Is this correct understanding?

In addition, there is no mention of Azure IoT Hub.

Is Azure IoT Operations a replacement for Azure IoT Edge and Azure IoT Hub? Or do they coexist?

Answer 1

太田寛 Greetings & Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum!

I feel that Azure IoT Operations is replacement for Azure IoT Edge. Is this correct understanding? In addition, there is no mention of Azure IoT Hub. Is Azure IoT Operations a replacement for Azure IoT Edge and Azure IoT Hub? Or do they coexist?

Azure IoT Operations is not a replacement for Azure IoT Edge or Azure IoT Hub. In fact, they all serve different purposes in an IoT solution.

Azure IoT Edge is a device-focused runtime that enables you to deploy, run, and monitor containerized Linux workloads. It helps you bring the analytical power of the cloud closer to your devices to drive better business insights and enable offline decision making. Azure IoT Edge is a feature of Azure IoT Hub and enables you to scale out and manage an IoT solution from the cloud.

Azure IoT Hub is a fully managed service that enables reliable and secure bidirectional communications between millions of IoT devices and a solution back end. It provides features such as device management, telemetry data ingestion, and command and control.

Azure IoT Operations is an industrial cloud to edge data and messaging plane, enabled by Azure Arc. With its modular services organizations can build interoperable digital solutions that transform physical operations at scale. Azure IoT Operations creates edge-intelligent feedback loops to help diverse professionals to collaborate and solve operational problems faster.

Organizations need visibility in their operations to optimize processes, save costs, and increase safety. Often, digital solutions developed to achieve this visibility are built on siloed, proprietary technology stacks resulting in burdensome ecosystems, disconnected insights, and difficulty scaling solutions across multiple facilities.

Azure IoT Operations is composed of modular services designed to help organizations discover devices, capture insights, and take actions to optimize their operations.

• Unify management of equipment, infrastructure, and apps.
• A seamless modular experience - Interoperable services that streamline integration.
• Democratize operational data.
• Consistently build applications for scale.

Azure IoT Operations is suited for a variety of use cases in various industries such as predictive/prescriptive maintenance, factory automation, asset health, sustainable operations, modernizing store operations, edge vision AI, and real time analytics and monitoring.

So, to answer your question, Azure IoT Operations is not a replacement for Azure IoT Edge or Azure IoT Hub. They all serve different purposes in an IoT solution and can coexist.

See Accelerating Industrial Transformation with Azure IoT Operations for more details.

Do let me know if that helps or have any other queries.

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Answer 2

Hello @太田寛 ,

welcome to this moderated Azure community forum.

Azure IoT Edge is a great Edge solution for all kinds of edge devices, great and small.

It is tightly integrated with Azure IoT Hub.

Microsoft has now introduced Azure IoT Operations (in Public Preview at this moment).

See this as a new edge solution targeting a new group of users and use cases.

Yes, parts of AIO will look familiar but the use case differs a little:

• Based on Kubernetes, Azure Arc, Intune
• Heavy hardware requirements
• Offers failover on the edge (multiple physical devices can be defined as one edge 'device')
• Numerous additional services for handling messages on the edge
• At this moment connectivity with Azure Event Grid MQTT support

In my opinion, Azure IoT Operations is positioned for bigger edge solutions and tighter integration with common IT solutions.

So it is a new solution living next to the existing Azure IoT Edge and we can choose the right solution for our situation.

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