Understanding Microsoft Azure IoT

Microsoft Azure IoT is a collection of Microsoft Azure cloud services used to build IoT applications. Microsoft Azure IoT applications are built using physical sensors and the Azure web portal. Access to the web portal is controlled through an Azure account. The following diagram shows a typical IoT application using Microsoft Azure IoT:

The IoT application shown in the preceding diagram is similar to the ones we've designed earlier in this chapter. It features a temperature sensor hooked up to an ESP8266 microcontroller. Data from the ESP8266 microcontroller is sent to the Azure cloud service. Using the Azure portal, we would configure the IoT Hub, Stream Analytics, Storage, and Web App components.

Using the Microsoft Azure IoT platform instead of building our own platform, we are able to utilize pre-written code, as well as have an infrastructure already set up. We do not need to buy and set up our own servers or configure a hosted web server. This saves us time as well as money, as we only pay for what we need. We will cover these concepts in more detail in Chapter 4, Working with Microsoft Azure IoT Hub.

Now that we have an understanding of Microsoft Azure IoT, let's take a look at Azure IoT Edge.