Azure IoT Hub Setup

What is Azure IoT Hub?

Azure IoT Hub is a managed Service from Microsoft to develop Internet Of Things solutions. It enables  reliable and  secured bi-directional (devices to IoT Hub and IoT Hub to devices) communications.

What is Internet of Things(IoT)?

It’s an internet (network) of things (devices), which can communicate with the others, using communications protocols.

Below are some bullet points related to Azure IoT Hub

• It provides Cloud to device and device to Cloud messaging at scale.
• Enables secure communications, using per-device security credentials and access control.
• Provides monitoring for the device connectivity and device identity management events.
• Supports AMQP, AMQP over WebSockets, MQTT, and HTTP/1, works with the Azure IoT Protocol Gateway, a customizable protocol gateway implementation to support custom protocols.

To complete this tutorial, you'll need the following,

• An active Azure account. (If you don't have an account, you can create a free trial account in just a couple of minutes. For details, see Azure Free Trial.)

Please follow the steps, given below, to create Azure IoT Hub in the preview portal.

1. Login to Azure Portal.
   
   
2. In the jumpbar (on left side bar) click + New, a New blade will open, in search box search for IoT hub and select IoT Hub from the search list, as shown in the image, given below:
   
   
   
   
3. Above step will open the Everything blade. As a result of search; in result selection, shown below, click Iot Hub.
   
   
   
   
4. Above step will open the IoT Hub blade , click create button, as shown, in the image, given below:
   
   
   
   
5. The above step will open the IoT hub blade for the configuration, as shown in the image, given below:
   
   
   
   
   • In the Name box, provide a host name for IoT hub. If the Name is valid and available within Azure-device.NET, a Green check mark appears in the Name box.
     
     
   • Select Pricing and scale tier. Pricing and scale tier defines the capacity and scalability of IoT Hub ex: No of messages / unit/ day, maximum units etc. For this article, selecting Free F1, results in default values for IoT Hub unit and Partitions.
     
     
   • Selecting Pricing and scale tier other than Free:
     
     
     • Enter the IoT Hub units. We can enter accordingly Pricing and scale tier max unit limits.
       
       Note: At any given time, it is possible to increase the quotas or throttle limits by increasing the number of provisioned units in an IoT hub.
       
       
     • Select Device-to-cloud-partions : min 2 partions and max 32 partions allowed.
       
       
   • Create or use existing resource group.
     
     
   • Select subscription : If single subscription is there, it will be selected. However, if there are more than one, we need to select the appropriate subscription.
     
     
   • Select location where we want to host our IoT Hub.
     
     
   • I selected the option of Pin to Dashboard. This option pins the resource to currently selected dashboard.
     
     
6. When all the configuration of IoT Hub is done, click on Create button. It will take a few minutes for Azure to create IoT Hub. After clicking create button, it will take you to the current Dashboard as shown in the image, given below, where we can see the status of the deployment process.
   
   
   
   
7. When the process of creating Iot Hub is done successfully, Azure IoT Hub blade with newly created IoT Hub is opened, as shown in the image, given below:
   
   
   

Here, we have created Azure IoT Hub. Its ready to receive the messages and send the messages to the devices, when the devices are configured to use IoT Hub.