Microsoft Workshop: Developing for Internet of Things, London

The workshop took place in Microsoft office at 100 Victoria Street. The crowd was pretty big. First we came through a couple of presentations and then did three labs. Overall, the workshop was very interesting, it gave a good overview of what IoT consists of, where we are with it at the moment and how it would possibly evolve in near future. See below some take aways that I think could be helpful to review later on.

Our presenters were:

• Paul Foster, DX Microsoft UK, and
• Robert Hogg, MVP, Microsoft Integration, MD Black Marble

Some notes:

1. There are open source IoT frameworks (for example, check out AllJoyn)
2. IoT provides Data-Driven Insights (Telemetry):
1. More efficient use of resources (cost reduction, environmental impact)
2. More targeted products and services (social impact, increased revenue)
3. While working with connected devices, it's very hard to predict in advance what data will be useful. The important data may not be what was expected in the beginning. Therefore:
1. It's tempting but likely inefficient to try for business transformation in the first step.
2. Need to think about not only device telemetry but also diagnostic telemetry.
4. Privacy and security have to be addressed at very early stages.
5. Although the ability to control devices remotely could be quite helpful, in the beginning designers may need to get used to work with devices that provide one-way communication only.
6. Microsoft goal to support in Azure ANY device!
7. https://www.wirelessthings.net
8. Hortonworks Sandbox is a free installation of Hadoop that comes with sample data and tutorials. It could be installed on a personal computer - it's a great tool to start playing with real Hadoop.
9. Lots of interest in R programming. R is used in practically all universities across UK and investment banking. Many R scripts come for free from academia.
10. Practical Data Science and support for it is quite popular within nowadays business activity.
11. Microsoft provides free consulting advises for IoT initiatives.

Some slides:

1. It is expected that interest in IoT will get into initial peak then it may cool off with gradual and steady grows of popularity afterwards:

2. Different level of IoT evolution:

3. ToDo roadmap:

4. Variety of IoT devices:

5. IoT challenges:

6. Pattern to start with:

7. This is what Microsoft offers on Windows Azure for IoT:

8. Some IoT problems that could be solved with Windows Azure:

9.

10.

11. This Event Hub is already available in Windows Azure. In fact we used it in our first lab.

12. Stream Analytics is also already available in Windows Azure. We used it in out second lab.

13. Stream Analytics front-end in Windows Azure looks almost as simple as this diagram:

14. I'm not sure if it's really a 'pattern' but it's good to keep in mind that volume of incoming messages in IoT could be really huge:

15. Possible IoT participants:

16. This slide represents a great desire to keep IoThings under a tight control. We'll see if it would become a reality or stay just a dream:

17. This is what Event Hub on Windows Azure is capable of:

18. When I see such slides I think more and more about Lua, Barracuda Embedded Server and Express Logic:

19. Network security means encryption. I'm not quite sure why does a message from, say, a temperature sensor that has only two fields - IP address and temperature value - have to be encrypted? Keep in mind that millions of such messages would need to be decrypted at the Event Hub on arrival...

20. More about security:

21. It's good to know that there is the IoT Suite. We didn't play with it, so I don't really know how it looks like:

22. More concerns about IoT:

23. I guess that if you would follow one of the last two links, you might find this presentation in an original file:

24. These are three labs that I did on that day. First two required configuration on Windows Azure. In last one I used a Raspberry platform as a sensor that sends messages to the Event Hub configured in the first lab. I should admit that it was quite interesting to do this. Event Hub with Stream Analytics looked very similar to CEP (Complex Event Processing) that I worked with before.

25. Azure community is steadily growing. I have already booked a place for IoT & Data Hackathon in Reading and hope to put some info about it on the web as well:

26. It seems that topics on this slide and many more could be learnt on Microsoft workshops in London for free:

27. More events:

28. More links:

29. And more links: