What is Azure IoT Operations Preview?

Important

Azure IoT Operations Preview – enabled by Azure Arc is currently in PREVIEW. You shouldn't use this preview software in production environments.

You will need to deploy a new Azure IoT Operations installation when a generally available release is made available; you won't be able to upgrade a preview installation.

See the Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews for legal terms that apply to Azure features that are in beta, preview, or otherwise not yet released into general availability.

Azure IoT Operations Preview is a unified data plane for the edge. It's composed of a set of modular, scalable, and highly available data services that run on Azure Arc-enabled edge Kubernetes clusters such as AKS Edge Essentials. It enables data capture from various different systems and integrates with data modeling applications such as Microsoft Fabric to help organizations deploy the industrial metaverse.

Azure IoT Operations:

• Is built from ground up by using Kubernetes native applications.
• Includes an industrial-grade, edge-native MQTT broker that powers event-driven architectures.
• Is highly extensible, scalable, resilient, and secure.
• Lets you manage all edge services from the cloud by using Azure Arc.
• Can integrate customer workloads into the platform to create a unified solution.
• Supports GitOps configuration as code for deployment and updates.
• Natively integrates with Azure Event Hubs, Azure Event Grid's MQTT broker, and Microsoft Fabric in the cloud.

Architecture overview

There are two core elements in the Azure IoT Operations Preview architecture:

• Azure IoT Operations Preview. The set of data services that run on Azure Arc-enabled edge Kubernetes clusters. It includes the following services:
  • The MQTT broker is an edge-native MQTT broker that powers event-driven architectures.
  • The connector for OPC UA handles the complexities of OPC UA communication with OPC UA servers and other leaf devices.
• The operations experience is a web UI that provides a unified experience for operational technologists to manage assets and data processor pipelines in an Azure IoT Operations deployment. An IT administrator can use Azure Arc sites to control the resources that an operational technologist can access in the portal.

Deploy

Azure IoT Operations runs on Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters on the edge. You can deploy Azure IoT Operations by using the Azure portal or the Azure CLI.

Note

During public preview, there's no support for upgrading an existing Azure IoT Operations deployment to a newer version. Instead, remove Azure IoT Operations from your cluster and then deploy the latest version. For more information, see Update Azure IoT Operations.

Manage devices and assets

Azure IoT Operations can connect to various industrial devices and assets. You can use the operations experience or the Azure CLI to manage the devices and assets that you want to connect to.

The connector for OPC UA manages the connection to OPC UA servers and other leaf devices. The connector for OPC UA publishes data from the OPC UA servers and the devices discovered by Akri services to MQTT broker topics.

The Akri services help you discover and connect to other types of devices and assets.

Publish and subscribe with MQTT

The MQTT broker runs on the edge. It lets you publish and subscribe to MQTT topics. You can use the MQTT broker to build event-driven architectures that connect your devices and assets to the cloud.

Examples of how components in Azure IoT Operations use the MQTT broker include:

• The connector for OPC UA publishes data from OPC UA servers and other leaf devices to MQTT topics.
• Data processor pipelines subscribe to MQTT topics to retrieve messages for processing.
• Northbound cloud connectors subscribe to MQTT topics to fetch messages for forwarding to cloud services.

Connect to the cloud

To connect to the cloud from Azure IoT Operations, you have the following options:

The northbound cloud connectors let you connect the MQTT broker directly to cloud services such as:

• MQTT brokers
• Azure Event Hubs or Kafka
• Azure Data Lake Storage

Process data

In Azure IoT operations v0.6.0, the data processor is replaced by dataflows. Dataflows provide enhanced data transformation and data contextualization capabilities within Azure IoT Operations.

Note

If you want to continue using the data processor, you must deploy Azure IoT Operations v0.5.1 with the additional flag to include data processor component. It's not possible to deploy the data processor with Azure IoT Operations v0.6.0. The Azure IoT operations CLI extension that includes the flag for deploying the data processor is version 0.5.1b1. This version requires Azure CLI v2.46.0 or greater. The data processor documentation is currently available on the previous versions site: Azure IoT Operations data processor.

Visualize and analyze telemetry

To visualize and analyze telemetry from your devices and assets, you can use cloud services such as:

• Microsoft Fabric
• Power BI

Secure communication

To secure communication between devices and the cloud through isolated network environments based on the ISA-95/Purdue Network architecture, use the Azure IoT Layered Network Management Preview component.

Validated environments

Azure Iot Operations ships as a set of Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes services and is intended for use with CNCF conformant Arc validated partner products. Currently, Microsoft has validated Azure IoT Operations against the following fixed-set of infrastructures and environments:

Environment	Version
AKS-EE on Windows 11 IoT Enterprise on a single-node AMD Ryzen-7 (8 core, 3.3 GHz), 16-GB RAM	AksEdge-K3s-1.28.3-1.7.639.0
K3s on Ubuntu 22.04.2 on a single-node AMD Ryzen-7 (8 core, 3.3 GHz), 16-GB RAM	K3s version 1.28.5

Important

The environments listed previously are production-like environments that Microsoft has validated. They're not the only environments that Azure IoT Operations can run on. Azure IoT Operations can run on any Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster that meets the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes system requirements.

Supported regions

In the 0.6.x public preview release, Azure IoT Operations supports clusters that are Arc-enabled in the following regions:

• East US
• East US 2
• West US
• West US 2
• West Europe
• North Europe

Note

West US 3 was supported in previous versions of Azure IoT Operations, but isn't supported in version 0.6.x.

This list of supported regions only applies to the region that you use when connecting your cluster to Azure Arc. This list doesn't restrict you from using your preferred Azure region for your cloud resources. Azure IoT Operations components and other resources deployed to your cluster in these supported regions can still connect to cloud resources in different regions.

Next step

Try the Quickstart: Get started with an end-to-end sample.