Azure is an open, flexible, enterprise grade cloud computing platform and a growing collection of integrated services such as analytics, database, mobile, networking, storage, and web for building scalable solutions rapidly. Microsoft provides Azure IoT Suite as part of its preconfigured IoT solutions built on the Azure platform and makes it easy to connect devices securely. Azure supports a broad set of protocols, and Azure IoT Suite consists of set of IoT services (referred to as Azure IoT services) to help build IoT apps rapidly. These services enable you to collect data from devices, analyze data streams in motion, store and query large data sets, and analyze and visualize both real-time and historical data. Services include Azure IoT Hub, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Notification Hubs, and Microsoft Power BI. You can combine these services with other Azure services, such as those for data and storage, to store device data in an Azure Blob or use cognitive services to build intelligent IoT apps.
Azure IoT Hub is a fully managed bidirectional device to cloud connectivity bus that provides device management, device security, identity, and MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol support with HTTP and Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). Azure IoT Hub provides complete device access through its device identity registry. It provides per device authentication and secure bidirectional connectivity between devices and Azure IoT Hub. Azure IoT Hub can also integrate with your custom device registry through a token service to create a devices coped token for secure communication. In addition, Azure IoT Hub provides local storage of messages and a dedicated device queue for each connected device for storing device messages that devices consume securely, eliminating the overhead of creating separate queues for sending messages back to devices.
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