Azure IoT Hub General Availability: An Overview of the Hub & the Opportunity

From a Microsoft demo of an Azure IoT Suite Fleet Management scenario 

Microsoft's Azure IoT Hub reached general availability last week and added a range of new features beyond what was in the public preview.

As described in a new blog post from Nayana Singh, Sr. Program Manager, Azure IoT, the full feature set includes:

• Bulk device identity import/export, which enables bulk import of device IDs into an IoT Hub's device registry, or export/import into another IoT Hub for failover.
• Operations monitoring, enabling users to monitor the status of operations on their IoT Hub real-time.
• Diagnostic metrics, aimed at providing better data on the state of the Azure resources in your subscription; also on the health of your IoT Hub and the devices connected to it.
• Native support for MQTT, meaning no protocol gateway is needed.
• AMQP over WebSockets where firewall requirements previously blocked AMQP use.
• Availability in three new regions, being Southeast Asia, West Europe and West US, in addition to East Asia, East US and Northern Europe.

Those updates are in addition to capabilities provided in the public preview like per-device authentication, device libraries, and support for IoT protocols.

"This service provides capabilities for securely connecting, provisioning, updating and sending commands to devices. IoT Hub enables companies ...