Microsoft 'retires' Azure IoT Central in platform rethink

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/15/microsoft_retires_azure_iot_central/

by CharlesW • 2 years ago

38 16 2 years ago

The IoT team is reshuffled every few years. They made it a bit longer than most. I accepted a job offer to join the IoT team out of college. I finished my last semester and four months later when I joined, that team no longer existed.

maxrmk• 2 years ago

Are you me? This exact same thing happened to me when I graduated back in 2017. I wonder if was the same year, or if this is a recurring thing the IoT team does.

matthewfcarlson3• 2 years ago

Haha, I don’t think so. It was January 2017 so probably the same time period. Hopefully, it ended up working out for you like it worked out for me.

borissk• 2 years ago

What did they do then?

matthewfcarlson3• 2 years ago

Put me on a sister team to the old team. It felt like a bait and switch, though it ended up being a good experience

leros• 2 years ago

Google Cloud also end of lifed their IoT service a while ago.

mrweasel• 2 years ago

I wonder how many IoT devices rely on this service, and how many of those deploy will receive updates to move them so something else.

brk• 2 years ago

Presumably far less than what is required to make the offering value to Microsoft. Still it is probably hundreds of thousands of devices, if not low millions.

mikece• 2 years ago

So... Amazon Greengrass is the last one standing?

a_vanderbilt• 2 years ago

I swear half of the knowledge in my head regarding AWS is mapping the product names to what they actually do.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 2 years ago

For other readers, Greengrass is their IoT agent that manages updates and remote access and stuff, like JFrog Connect

lfpeb8b45ez• 2 years ago

I’m not surprised by this: IoT Hub is the core infrastructure piece powering Azure IoT, and it’s not going anywhere per the article. IoT Central, which is being phased out, was a layer on top of IoT Hub and other components that always had a somewhat awkward position. By trying to offer prepackaged IoT solutions, a lot of the power features were harder to use, but the solutions weren’t really end-user ready. Given the IoT hype dying down this makes sense.

karmicthreat• 2 years ago

I need to make a little MQTT communications system for some field devices. I should probably just give up with AWS and Azure for IoT and just roll my own. Though they did have some nice security around their offerings.

smiler• 2 years ago

I think my company was told a year ago to not use IoT Central as it was going to be deprecated.

They also made ThreadX open source a few months back. Be interesting to see what else happens in the IoT area for Microsoft

rickdeckard• 2 years ago

Updated (not so explicit) retraction from Microsoft, stating the message was an error: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things-bl...

OneWolf• 2 years ago

Microsoft is pivoting and that is bad for any company relying on Azure IoT Central. We saw Google deprecate their IoT Core last year which was similar to Azure IoT Hub.

In the end, I don't trust the cloud hyperscalars when it comes to IoT. It's not their core business and all they care about is CPU workload and data ingestion into AI on their clouds.

Microsoft 'retires' Azure IoT Central in platform rethink

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