Azure IoT Hub Automates Message Routing Logic With New Update
Posted By : Anirudh Bhardwaj | 28-Feb-2017

It’s been more than a year since Microsoft commercially released its Azure IoT Hub which aims on facilitating the IoT operations for various organizations. Being a part of Microsoft’s Azure IoT suite, the IoT hub is a set of interoperable services that are primarily used for establishing secure bidirectional communications between a large number of IoT devices. The network may include millions of IoT devices and a solution back end. Apart from that, the Azure IoT Hub offers robust and secure cloud-to-device as well as device-to-cloud hyperscale messaging.
Just so you know, the Azure IoT Hub boasts a messaging infrastructure for establishing the communication between the connected devices using several IoT protocols like HTTPS, MQTT and AMPQPS. Lately, Microsoft Azure team has made some notable amendments to the Azure IoT Hub. As per the new update, the routing logic used for messaging has been simplified. The new message routing system facilitates the communication by automatically routing the messages to different data processing systems via Azure messaging services.
You may also like A Brief Introduction To Azure IoT Platform.
Simplifying The Complexities
As a matter of fact, the IoT solutions can be at times, quite complicated. The distributed messaging infrastructure employed in an IoT network only adds to the complexities. Azure IoT Hub is no exception. Of course, the complications arise in establishing a robust and secure communication. For instance, you can imagine a gigantic network of millions of interconnected devices sending different messages to the IoT Hub. To make things worse, some of these messages must be addressed on high-priority basis while some are meant for long term storage.
Handling all these messages while maintaining the sovereignty of the network in itself is a challenge. In such scenario, the users were normally required to build a routing logic each time they send a message.
But it’s not as simple as it sounds. Building a routing logic involves quite a few tedious tasks such as dealing with the lost data, determining and countering transient faults as well as the scaling of routing logic.
In this context, the new update to the Azure IoT Hub is definitely a major relief. Microsoft has added a new feature called Message Routing to its Azure IoT Hub which enables you to set up automatic routing to different IoT devices and systems using a specific routing logic in IoT Hub. Using this new feature, you can also configure the IoT Hub in order to route the messages to the backend processing services as custom end-points.
Other Enhancements
With this update, Microsoft has made several other enhancements to its Azure IoT Hub. For instance, the metrics and operations that monitor the logs are also augmented, thereby making it easier to determine when an end-point is misbehaving or the issues pertaining to the incorrect routing configuration.
So all in all, this new update aims on streamlining the complexities involved in the messaging infrastructure and establishing a secure connection for communication with minimal intrications. Let’s hope it goes well with the expectations of the customers.