Microsoft's IoT boost to enterprises; beta version of Azure IoT Gateway SDK

One of the promising grounds that Internet of Things (IoT) treads upon is bringing digital order to your messy analog world. And to attempt this goal, Microsoft announced the availability of the beta version of the Azure IoT Gateway software development kit (SDK) at to ensure easy connectivity of devices to the Internet. At Build 2016 held last month, the SDK was made available in a private preview to help companies thrive in this era of IoT, delivering open, scalable platforms and services that any company, whether startup or the most established global enterprises, can use to create new value. However, it has reconsidered its decision making Azure available on GitHub under an open source MIT license.

“The Azure IoT Gateway SDK does not place restrictions on the type of gateway solution that can be created,” Sam George, partner director, for Azure IoT at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. “Our IoT philosophy is to support the many different types of operating systems and hardware developers use, so we’ve built the gateway with ANSI C on top of a platform abstraction layer, providing a high performance gateway framework with a portable and cross-platform library that runs on both Windows and Linux.”

As Sam George explained in his blog post in March, field gateways are is a vital component for an IoT deployment and Azure IoT Gateway SDK enables developers and ISVs to easily build and deploy modules for edge intelligence, giving them the ability to optimize and process data before it’s sent to the cloud. It also enables them to connect legacy devices to the Azure cloud without having to replace existing infrastructure. The Azure IoT Gateway SDK achieves this by providing source code that takes care of much of the necessary busy work required for the development of a gateway application, including dynamic module loading, configuration, and data pipelining. This isn’t the first open source SDK for working with IoT devices in association with Microsoft’s Azure public cloud. Microsoft has previously released Azure IoT device SDKs for C, Java, .NET, Node, and Python. But with a cut-throat competition injected from cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services that has its own AWS IoT service with open source embedded C and JavaScript SDKs, the game is just on!