Technology and connectivity are constantly changing around us today. An example of this change is the level of connectivity between devices through the use of Cloud services.
Cloud storage and services can be used by companies and individuals alike, at different scales, and for different purposes. These services can provide a lot of beneficial things like storage, backup and recovery, and other solutions for businesses and individuals.
Amongst the most commonly available Cloud services, Microsoft’s Azure IoT Edge is one of the best Internet of Things solutions services. This article takes a look at the many ways in which Azure’s IoT Edge is beneficial for video streaming and other purposes.
What Is Azure IoT Edge?
Microsoft’s IoT Edge is an Internet of Things solutions service that utilizes Edge computing. This means that Microsoft’s Azure IoT Edge is a Cloud service that allows for computing to take place at the edge of where the home network ends and the devices connect to the internet. This computing could be taking place on your main network or a guest network that has a firewall of some sort. With this Cloud service, computing services are processed by the IoT devices, instead of Cloud servers.
In more detail, when a set of IoT devices are connected to the Cloud server, they send in a lot of data. This data, if there is no Edge service installed, is computed in Cloud. With the installation of Edge IoT devices, these devices will individually compute data before sending it to Cloud. This saves a lot of time as now Cloud will not have too much data to be processed.
The Benefits of Using Azure IoT Edge
Azure IoT Edge is one of the leading forms of IoT services. Since its release in 2010, it has become well-known for its many uses and benefits. Listed below are some of them:
1. Video Analytics With Azure IoT Edge
With Microsoft’s Azure, an IoT app development company can use its Live Video Analytics (LVA) platform to allow IoT Edge devices to upload videos to a Cloud and have them analyzed. This means that, with the help of artificial intelligence, this LVA feature allows businesses to monitor their employees as they are working. This lets businesses make sure that safety protocols are being followed and so on, to create a better working environment.
2. An Open-Source Platform
Azure IoT is available as open-source and free software on GitHub, where a lot of such software is hosted. By open-sourcing this software, Microsoft allows a lot of openness and flexibility to its Azure Cloud services.
With this move, both customers and Microsoft are benefitted as it fosters trust for the company and its product while allowing users to customize their deployments in terms of existing asset management solutions, data formats, and interoperability with the use of proprietary communication protocols.
3. The Core Containers
The engine that runs Azure IoT Edge is Moby. This is a container runtime that is open-sourced and powers other software like the macOS Docker. This allows an IoT app development company to bundle and create Docker containers as the modules of Azure IoT Edge as well.
In this, the output that is produced by one module can be used as the input for another module and a chain of containers can be made to work together. Microsoft is creating a lot of such services, including Stream Analytics and SQL Server. Through this, each module can be maintained by itself, without having to run the whole application. This adoption of Docker containers for Azure IoT Edge services and packages allows a customer to manage a complex chain of Edge devices.
4. Managing The Ecosystem
Azure IoT has a large and varied ecosystem of Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs). Some of these vibrant services are expanded from Azure IoT to Azure IoT Edge as well. Management of this ecosystem is done through a capability-based certification program.
Through this certification program, vendors or sellers teaming up with Azure IoT Edge can be evaluated on the basis of their levels of capabilities. For instance, vendors, sellers, or IoT app development services that target the central concessions will be given a level-one certificate while a seller or vendor with a high-security capability will be given a level-four certificate. This gives customers a large list of developers or partners to choose from, depending on their needs.
5. Better Security
Azure IoT Edge provides an upgrade on some security features as well. This software uses systems such as the Device Provisioning Service to render the Edge devices that are securely created by IoT app development services. It also has a Safety Supervisor that protects each of the Azure IoT Edge devices by abstracting its in-built protected silicon hardware. It also allows for the hardening of security through the use of Hardware Security Modules or HSM.
6. Artificial Intelligence At Azure IoT Edge
With the help of various upgrades, Microsoft has made the running of system learning models quite easy. A mobile app development company can teach their versions of Azure through the use of services like Azure ML Studio. Additionally, Azure IoT Edge supports the running of versions that are sprinkled in Azure’s AutoML service.
With these services, the artificial intelligence of Azure IoT Edge allows the usage of different frameworks that can then be made into standard forms, prior to using them for computing.
Conclusion
Evidently, there is a lot that a mobile app development company can do with Azure IoT Edge. It plays a very crucial role in providing an intelligent Cloud service to customers who only stand to benefit from it. Specifically, with aspects like container modules and integration of HSM plugins, Azure IoT Edge has a lot to offer to the border computing technology that is essential to businesses. Therefore, it is true that the usage of Cloud services like Azure IoT Edge is definitely the way into the future.
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