Microsoft 'retires' Azure IoT Central in platform rethink

The IoT team is reshuffled every few years. They made it a bit longer than most. I accepted a job offer to join the IoT team out of college. I finished my last semester and four months later when I joined, that team no longer existed.

I’m not surprised by this: IoT Hub is the core infrastructure piece powering Azure IoT, and it’s not going anywhere per the article. IoT Central, which is being phased out, was a layer on top of IoT Hub and other components that always had a somewhat awkward position. By trying to offer prepackaged IoT solutions, a lot of the power features were harder to use, but the solutions weren’t really end-user ready. Given the IoT hype dying down this makes sense.

Google Cloud also end of lifed their IoT service a while ago.

I think my company was told a year ago to not use IoT Central as it was going to be deprecated.

They also made ThreadX open source a few months back. Be interesting to see what else happens in the IoT area for Microsoft

Microsoft is pivoting and that is bad for any company relying on Azure IoT Central. We saw Google deprecate their IoT Core last year which was similar to Azure IoT Hub.

In the end, I don't trust the cloud hyperscalars when it comes to IoT. It's not their core business and all they care about is CPU workload and data ingestion into AI on their clouds.

Updated (not so explicit) retraction from Microsoft, stating the message was an error: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things-bl...

I need to make a little MQTT communications system for some field devices. I should probably just give up with AWS and Azure for IoT and just roll my own. Though they did have some nice security around their offerings.

I wonder how many IoT devices rely on this service, and how many of those deploy will receive updates to move them so something else.

So... Amazon Greengrass is the last one standing?