Azure IoT Edge: Microsoft’s 60k LOC open source Rust code base | Hacker News Reader

Azure IoT Edge: Microsoft’s 60k LOC open source Rust code base

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189 pointsavalleytank44 comments

With my experience of working on +300 IoT projects - In majority IoT application edge computing is not required, devices generate very less data and perform simple computing or no computimg at all.In embedded usually it's better to keep things simple so that cost and bugs can be reduced. Most IoT application or solutions are usually not adopted due to hardware cost (capex) so keeping devices processing, memory and development cost low is important. Few measures can keep IoT deployment secure and you don't need a complex framework - TPM, Secure Boot, Secure Update and SSL/TLS are enough. I still see that such IoT framework will only be used in small % of IoT applications. With public networks getting more reliable and cost effective edge computing would become more of a maintenance nightmare than benefit.So keeping IoT devices thin and doing most of the processing on cloud is better. Though I do agree that in some application IoT endge analytics and computing has value. I believe we are living in a work of political and technology hype :).

What if you have poor/intermittent backend connectivity, low latency requirements, or are handling sensitive data and don't want to ship it to a cloud backend? I think there can be a place for this model. Perhaps something like GDPR can make it more attractive? In the projects you have worked on, was the primary motivation maintainability or a business need to gather all data centrally in order to perform some kind of global cross device analysis/aggregation?

If I would design a service I would rather trust my cloud provider with an SSL connection in between, than a heterogeneous mix of servers that may be physically compromised (there are very few places that could house an "edge" at datacenter security standards).

Dan I agree there is place for this model especially when you want to make local decisions or produce lot of data (e.g. video). In most of the projects we handled data required central aggregation.

Using IoT Edge as a gateway is a popular and supported scenario: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-edge/iot-edge-as-...

I work on an image/video analysis type project. Internet connectivity is over (sometimes flaky) LTE. We could not live with a «thin device» unless we had a fiber link to the cloud.

Even if you do simple point measurements (e.g a weather station with temperature, pressure etc) it might make QA sense to perform multiple measurements and reject outliers, take an average etc before reporting to The Cloud.

Is your project/business public? If so any chance you could provide a link? I'm interested in this space from a research angle and it would be great to be able to point to a real-world use case.

Update: Oops! confused it with Azure Sphere: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/

IoT Edge came out of a program in MS research where they determined that for an IoT device to be truly secure, it has to have a bunch of attributes, including layers of security from hardware to OS, automatic and cryptographically signed updates, etc.

And then they set out to build it (and it runs a stripped down Linux kernel). I think it’s awesome but have no idea how much it’s supposed to cost. The dev board is $85.

This looks to be some of the low level code for it.

I find it very exciting from what I’ve read.

Azure Sphere looks promising but the Microsoft $85 Linux dev board SDK requires a Windows 10 device with Visual Studio for development. Hopefully this is not another "Apple does it, so we can too" posture.

If Sphere succeeds, many people will be happy to buy a network router that comes with 10 years of Microsoft Linux security updates.

MS demo of BASIC on the Sphere cpu in an Altair: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2018/05/21/azure_sphere_go...

> Azure Sphere looks promising but the Microsoft $85 Linux dev board SDK requires a Windows 10 device with Visual Studio for development.

LOL. :)

Link? Because that’s very surprising and out of character, especially for a new project.

Update: found link https://m.seeedstudio.com/productDetail/3052

Well that didn’t burst my bubble but definitely shrunk it quite a bit. Hopefully they’re building VS code plugins too.

Azure Sphere dev here. Like any early project, we had to make many strategic choices on where to invest limited development time in. There are an endless number of features and platforms we'd love to support, but Visual Studio is an obvious first environment to target. I can't give you a timeline, but we're definitely investing in cross-platform tools.

I must admit I'm disappointed Seeed set such a high price for the dev kit, but there will be more boards in the future.

Thanks for the response. This makes more sense now. I’m very excited about your project because the #1 reason I am apprehensive of IoT for my clients is because of its dismal security. It’s also the reason I only use HomeKit for my House.

Keep it up! This level of multi level security is much needed.

I hope a whole ecosystem springs around it given it’ll be built on a solid foundation.

As a software person, this gives me more options even though it’s hardware.

Out of curiosity, what are the features of HomeKit that give you confidence in its security? I ask so I can have another data point in my mind.

It's definitely our goal to have a large ecosystem, of both hardware and software.

From day one, HomeKit had hardware PKI (and strong crypto with a hardware security module on all their devices). All their authentication and messaging was fully end-to-end encrypted, but again, all _in hardware_. [1]

But the beauty of it was, you never felt that complexity in software as a customer. It's the proverbial Apple product. The tradeoff is, because you need this special hardware HomeKit chip, the ecosystem is pretty dull, or too expensive. And that's held back HomeKit adoption.

After playing chicken with the industry for years, Apple finally gave in and is allowing software HomeKit devices to get certified now. That actually does away with some of the security IMO. But that's ok, it bothers me slightly less to have HomeKit software based lights. Whereas, I wouldn't compromise on that when it comes to security (like locks on my doors, or the garage door).

Hope that helps.

While I've had aspirations to get more into home automation from the business side, most of my experience is as a consumer, so weigh my input that way. :-)

[1] HomeKit Accessory Protocol: https://developer.apple.com/support/homekit-accessory-protoc...

[2] NodeJS Implementation of it to emulate things: https://github.com/KhaosT/HAP-NodeJS

Here’s more about the project: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/janakiramm...

The Edge security daemon is the portion that is written in Rust.

Link: https://github.com/Azure/iotedge/tree/master/edgelet

I feel this needs more of a description

Its Microsoft! And they wrote a platform in Rust!

And only one of the components at that, the rest of the code is in C#.

that one component seem to be 32.8 percent of the code anyway, this seem like a none trivial part of this project

I feel I've heard enough.

Sooooo... what exactly is it? All I'm seeing is an endless barrage of buzzwords.

microsoft trying to get young people working for them.

It just seems to be a containerization/messaging platform. Like all things in the MS world, it doesn't exist unless it adds 10 new menus and a new configuration file to existing technology

Kudos to Microsoft for using Rust. It's a shame Google is attempting to write a new operating system (Fuchsia) almost from scratch right now, but is completely missing the opportunity to use Rust so it doesn't have to deal with decades of memory corruption bugs and other security-related bugs in the future.

At least some system parts are written in Go, like TCP/IP stack, file system mounting utilities and a few other drivers.

Also thankfully they are at least making use of modern C++ instead of C.

While not as safe as Rust, definitely better than plain C.

> Also thankfully they are at least making use of modern C++ instead of C. While not as safe as Rust, definitely better than plain C.

I see you're pointing a shotgun against your feet. Here, have this AR-15 with a safety-switch instead.

Agreed, but I also came to accept these things change quite slowly, when taking into account existing code, habits and beliefs.

Indeed, and several components are actually written in Rust, including the "recovery netstack" (whatever that is): https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/c/garnet/+/165955

We are writing a lot of things in Rust for Fuchsia. We are also incestung in Rust to get it to where it needs to be for such usage.

How does Fuschia compare to RedoxOS, apart from being further in development? Structurally speaking.

Indeed, it's great to see Microsoft both using Rust and open sourcing some of the work. As a major user of Rust at our startup (aside: we're hiring Rust engineers), it's great to see it gaining mainstream momentum month-by-month.

>Iot and Rust

Good God, let's make everything as trendy as possible.

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