What is Azure IoT Edge?

The IoT, Internet of Things, is a merger between the cloud, artificial intelligence and edge computing.

Azure IoT Edge allows you to stack up your cloud workloads, like Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services, Functions, and Stream Analytics, running them all locally on any device, from a small Pi to the largest of industrial gateways.

With Azure IoT Edge, you can use the Azure IoT Hub to manage your edge devices and applications, scaled to support whatever cloud or private environment solution you use.

  • Together with Qualcomm, Azure IoT Edge allows you to develop IoT camera-based solutions quickly and easily, combining edge computing and on-device vision AI.
  • IoT Edge optimizes performance between the cloud and edge, ensuring the lowest possible latency, while keeping up with security, management and scale.
  • Intelligent edge devices face much higher threats to security, from physical damage to having the IP hacked. With IoT Edge, security goes much deeper, extending to all kinds of risk profiles and scenarios for deployment.
  • With IoT Edge, deployment of machine learning, complex event processing, image recognition and more without having to write it all in-house. Azure services like Stream Analytics, Functions, and Machine Learning can easily be run on-site and AI module easily created with the AI Toolkit for Azure IoT Edge.
  • With services like trained models or Azure Steam Analytics, data can be locally processed with only what’s needed being sent to the cloud for analysis. This lowers the cost of sending data to the cloud while maintaining the high data quality.
  • IoT Edge shares the programming model that other Azure IoT services do which means one code can be run on-device or in the cloud. IoT Edge provides support for multiple operating systems, and multiple programming languages, enabling users to stick with what they know best and retain their business logic without having to start over.

IoT Edge can be used for multiple services, including:

  • Building and deploying AI models
  • Customization of computer vision models
  • Processing streaming data in real-time
  • Using serverless code for processing events
  • Deploying SQL Server databases to the edge
  • Building custom logic

Fully compliant with Industry 4.0 interoperability standards, Microsoft is continually adding services to Azure IoT Edge.