Microsoft Azure - Key IoT Products

We are living in a generation where devices are becoming smarter every day. Thanks to devices that can talk to each other, collect data, and even make decisions on their own. This is what we call the Internet of Things (IoT) and it's changing how businesses and homes work. But have you ever wondered how all these devices talk to each other and share data in real-time? That’s where Microsoft Azure comes in.

Azure is a cloud platform that offers powerful tools specifically designed for IoT. Whether you're working on a smart home, an industrial system, or even a connected car, Azure has solutions to help you build, manage, and monitor everything easily.

In this article, we are going to firstly we will discuss about Azure IoT, including its core products and services, complementary Azure offerings for IoT, and a comparison between Microsoft Azure IoT and other leading cloud IoT platforms.

What is Microsoft Azure IoT?

Azure IoT (Internet of Things) is a set of Microsoft-managed tools and cloud services that helps you connect, monitor, and control your smart devices using the cloud. Let's understand it with an example:

An IT company runs a large data center with hundreds of servers, cooling systems, and backup power units. To make sure everything runs smoothly and to avoid downtime, the company uses Azure IoT to monitor all critical equipment.

Sensors are installed on servers to track CPU temperature, power usage, humidity, and fan speed. These sensors send real-time data to Azure IoT Edge, which processes it locally to detect urgent issues like overheating or power spikes.

This filtered data is then pushed to the cloud using Azure IoT Hub, where it's stored and analyzed. With the help of Azure Machine Learning, the system can detect patterns and predict hardware failures before they happen. IT admins get alerts through dashboards created with Azure Monitor or Power BI, so they can take quick action—like moving workloads or scheduling maintenance.

Azure IoT Products and Services

The following are some important Azure IoT Products and Services:

1. Azure IoT Hub

Azure IoT hub is a Platform as a service that is present in the cloud. It helps in the communication between normal devices and IoT devices. It acts as a central hub that initiates the communication of the applications and IoT devices. It can store enormous amounts of data and offers seamless connectivity. We can securely integrate it with our applications. It allows us to collect data from various devices like Raspberry PI and Arduino. The Azure IoT allows us to send up to 800 messages per day. We can register up to 500 devices in it.

Pricing:

It has two tiers for pricing basic tier and standard tier. The basic tier charges $10 for 4,00,000 messages, $50 for 60,00,00 messages and $500 for 30,00,00,000 messages. The standard tier charges. 25$ for 4,00,000 messages, $250 for 60,00,000 messages and 2500$ for 30,00,00,000 messages.

2. Azure IoT Central

Azure IoT Central is a Software as a Service that acts as a bridge for connecting IOT devices with the cloud. It manages all the IoT devices. It is highly secured and the data is maintained safely in the cloud. The reason for moving to Azure IOT central is it reduces the need for maintenance employees for our IoT devices and security engineers since all these checks are taken care of by Azure IOT central. It also contains some predefined templates for IoT scenarios to make use of it.

Pricing:

It provides a free trial for up to 7 days. It follows the “Pay for use” model. It has three tiers. Tier 0 charges $0.08 per month for 400 messages. For tier 1, the charge is $0.40 per month for 5000 messages. Tier 2 charges $0.70 per month for 30,000 messages.

3. Azure Digital Twins

Azure Digital Twins is a Platform as a Service that enables the creation of digital twin graphs of real-world environments such as buildings, factories, or even entire cities. By modeling physical spaces and establishing relationships between components using a twin graph, it offers deep spatial intelligence. This helps businesses simulate operations and optimize performance. In smart buildings, for example, Azure Digital Twins can be used to adjust lighting and HVAC systems automatically based on occupancy and usage patterns, improving energy efficiency.

Pricing:

Azure Digital Twins charges are based on how much you use it, with no setup or fixed costs. You pay for three main things: API calls (about $2.50 for every million), messages sent to other services like Event Grid or Event Hub (around $1 per million), and data queries (about $0.50 per million). If your messages or results are larger than 1 KB, they count as more than one unit. This makes it affordable and flexible because you only pay for what you actually use.

4. Azure Sphere

Azure Sphere is a combination of Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service that provides a comprehensive solution for securing connected microcontroller units (MCUs). It includes a built-in operating system, secure hardware, and cloud-based security services that ensure device integrity and prevent cyberattacks. With automatic updates and robust protection at every layer, Azure Sphere is ideal for IoT scenarios where security is critical. A practical use case is in smart appliances like connected ovens or refrigerators, which need to stay protected from remote threats over their lifetime.

Pricing:

Azure Sphere is a security-focused IoT solution from Microsoft that protects devices from cyber threats. It comes with a special chip (called an MCU), a secure operating system, and built-in cloud security. The cost of the Azure Sphere chip, like the MediaTek MT3620AN, is under $8.95 and this price already includes the OS and the security service. You don’t need to pay extra every month or year for updates Microsoft provides security updates until at least July 2031. There are no surprise subscription fees. However, if you connect your Sphere devices to other Azure services, you might pay separately for those services. Prices may vary for newer chips depending on the manufacturer.

5. Azure Time Series Insights

Azure Time Series Insights is a visualization tool that can be used for visualizing all IoT events at the same time by feeding IoT data. It shows us the overall view of data which helps us to identify and validate our IoT solution. It is more scalable because as the IoT data grows, this Azure Time Series Insights is provided with the capacity to hold such a huge amount of data.

Pricing:

The Azure time series has two levels of pricing as Gen1 and Gen2. Gen1 has two types of pricing S1 and S2, the charge of S1 is $150.0 for 30GB storage, the charge of S2 is $1350 for 300GB storage. For Azure time series insights Gen2, the price for the Data processing unit is $36.208, for additional data processed it charges $0.246 per GB, for metadata storage it charges $0.050 per MB.

6. Azure IoT Edge

Azure IoT Edge is another cloud service provided by Microsoft for IoT. It helps us to effectively manage and maintain the edge devices. It brings the analytical power of the cloud to the edge devices thereby reducing the latency to a greater extent. It supports various languages like C, C#, Java, Node js, and python. Since it does the analytics in the edge devices itself it greatly reduces the cost which will happen while moving the data to the cloud.

Pricing:

The Azure IoT edge is free and runs edge modules freely. But it may charge us for pre-deployment works particularly if we use machine models. But in most cases, the azure IoT edge is used with the Azure IOT hub so, the pricing depends on the usage of the Azure IoT hub.  

Let's discuss all the important points of all ioT again with important features,benefits and example use cases:

Complementary Azure Services for IoT

Here are some of the key complementary services you should know about:

Microsoft Azure IoT vs Other Cloud IoT Platform

With the help of the following table you can easily compare what makes Microsoft Azure IoT better than the other cloud platforms:

Conclusion

Microsoft Azure makes building and managing IoT systems much easier, whether you are a beginner or running an enterprise-level project. With its wide range of tools from connecting devices to analyzing and visualizing data Azure gives you everything you need to create smart, secure, and scalable solutions. Microsoft Azure IoT is a combination of PaaS, SaaS and hardware-focused services that helps you to connect devices, process data at the edge, visualize patterns and act on real- time insights. Whether you are a developer, system architect, or IoT enthusiast Azure has something to offer.