Canonical provides the ideal platform for Microsoft Azure IoT Operations

London, 19 November 2024. Canonical has collaborated with Microsoft as an early adopter partner and tested Microsoft Azure IoT Operations on Ubuntu Core and Kubernetes, which is notable as Microsoft today released Azure IoT Operations, a unified data plane providing significant improvements in node data capture, edge-based telemetry processing and cloud-ingress. Azure IoT Operations is a critical component of Azure’s adaptive cloud approach, which integrates hybrid, multicloud, edge, and IoT environments to deliver secure, scalable automation. This adaptive cloud approach aligns with the evolving IoT market needs, fostering seamless integration and interoperability across a diverse landscape while breaking down silos across the enterprise. Organisations building IoT with Canonical’s solutions can take full advantage of the new Azure capabilities straight out-of-the-box to start enhancing their IoT ecosystems.

“Microsoft’s launch of Azure IoT Operations marks a significant advancement in the capabilities and potential of edge cloud computing. By combining their expertise with the security and stability offered by Canonical’s Ubuntu platforms, we feel the industry now has the canvas to create some truly groundbreaking products and systems. We eagerly anticipate seeing what innovative solutions will emerge.”

Michael Croft-White, Engineering Director, Canonical.

“Microsoft’s launch of Microsoft Azure IoT Operations represents a significant leap forward in the realm of edge-based computing. By integrating our advanced data services with the robust security and stability of Canonical’s Ubuntu platforms, we are empowering industries to innovate and create robust solutions. We look forward to the impact this collaboration will have on the IoT ecosystem.”

Kam VedBrat, general manager, Azure IoT at Microsoft.

Leverage the latest features of Ubuntu Core/Kubernetes to build your IOT solutions with Azure

Ubuntu has a long pedigree helping industries build IoT infrastructure as both a platform for devices, edge nodes or backend services. Until now, users have needed to implement their own data plane and telemetry configuration from scratch. Now with Azure IoT Operations, these devices can communicate in a unified manner across an entire fleet and beyond into the Azure cloud almost out of the box. By supporting the full end-to-end spectrum of components of IoT operations with a secure and guaranteed underpinning, customers can benefit from ease of deployment, consistency of operation and robust operations that are not available with other alternatives. With use cases in automotive, industrial, robotics, signage, and smart cities to name but a few, the possibilities are endless.

The power of the cloud at the edge

Azure IoT Operations consists of modular, scalable, and highly available data services that run on Azure Arc-enabled edge Kubernetes clusters. The platform captures data from a range of devices and systems and processes them in near real-time, using industry standards like MQTT, OPC-UA and OpenTelemetry to ensure a seamless data experience. Its use of Azure Arc to manage and govern your resources and deep native integration with Azure Event Hubs, Azure Event Grid, and Microsoft Fabric provides enhanced data modelling and analytics capabilities that are particularly useful for industries looking to implement predictive maintenance, factory automation and real-time analytics.

The security of Ubuntu Core, the power of Kubernetes on Ubuntu

Azure IoT Operations is built on Kubernetes, and the reference platform for Kubernetes is Ubuntu. Built on Canonical’s renowned reputation for its industry-standard excellence and robust security foundation, it ensures timely updates and patches to provide a secure environment for your deployment. Additionally, Ubuntu guarantees stability with long-term support and a consistent, predictable life cycle, as well as being a Microsoft validated platform .

Ubuntu Core is designed specifically for IoT and embedded devices. Ubuntu Core provides a minimal and immutable deployment environment with support for multiple architectures and types of devices. Security is baked-in with secure boot and full disk encryption, and over-the-air (OTA) transactional updates to ensure that devices are always up to date giving it a  range of features to make it ideal for secure, reliable, and scalable deployments. 

Through the global snap store, developers can quickly accelerate their time-to-market using example snaps for streaming both MQTT and OPC-UA telemetry to your Azure IoT Operations edge cluster. By following our simple quickstart guide (add link), you can stand up an End-to-End demonstration of getting data from your leaf nodes to the cloud safe in a matter of minutes.

Both Ubuntu and Ubuntu Core can be coupled with Canonical’s Long Term Support offering through Ubuntu Pro, which offers up to 12 years of maintenance and security updates, providing long-term peace of mind for your infrastructure and IoT requirements.

Further reading

More information on Ubuntu Core can be found at ubuntu.com/core. Our “Getting Started with Azure IoT Operations on Ubuntu” blog is a comprehensive resource for everything you need to know about Ubuntu Core.

If you are not already familiar with Microsoft’s Azure IoT Operations, more information can be found here. 

Are you interested in running Ubuntu Core with Azure IoT on your devices and are working on a commercial project?

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