What is the Best Way to Ingest IoT Data to Microsoft Azure?

Azure is widely considered to be one of the top 2 cloud platforms, along with AWS. Azure is also considered the top cloud platform for IoT applications. HiveMQ and IIoT World ran a survey that showed for companies implementing IIoT strategies, 26.1% are using Azure, 18.5% use AWS, and 17.8% are a private cloud self-hosted in a data center. In addition, IoT Analytics recently named Microsoft as the leading software vendor for IIoT. This is not surprising since Microsoft has been investing heavily in IoT technology.

At HiveMQ, many of our customers deploy their IoT applications on Azure so they can take advantage of the Azure enterprise services, such as machine learning, analytics, dashboarding, storage, etc. However, to ingest the IoT data to the Azure platform they use HiveMQ on Azure. The HiveMQ platform provides the scalability and reliability required to operate a business-critical IoT application, which otherwise would be quite a challenge. While Microsoft offers an IoT Hub service, by Microsoft’s own admission, IoT Hub is not a full MQTT broker.

HiveMQ on the other hand provides the best way to ingest IoT MQTT data to Azure with a complete MQTT broker.

The benefits of using a complete MQTT broker, like HiveMQ, are:

• Complete implementation of the MQTT 3.1.1 and MQTT 5 specification so you don’t have to limit the MQTT features you wish to use.

• Massive scalability to millions of client connections, millions of messages, hundreds of thousands of topics, etc. HiveMQ does not have built-in limitations that limit scalability.

• Maximum flexibility in terms of device on-boarding, deployment in the cloud or on-premise or both, and integration with Azure services or best-of-breed third-party services, like InfluxDB.

• Very high reliability to ensure you don’t lose any MQTT messages.

• Observability tools and metrics to make your IoT devices less of a black box as they connect with Azure.

Over the next number of months, we are going to be talking a lot about using HiveMQ to ingest IoT to Azure. We have already created a couple of articles and videos, with more on the way.

Many of our existing customers are benefiting from using HiveMQ on Azure so we want to make sure others know this is possible. When people ask, ‘What is the best way to ingest IoT data to Azure?’. The clear answer is HiveMQ, the best MQTT broker for Azure.