>> Hi everyone, join Vidhi and myself to talk
about Device Update for Azure IoT Hub in the next IoT Show.
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Hi everyone. Welcome to The IoT Show.
Today we are going to talk about updating
an IoT device using the device update for Azure IoT Hub.
I'm excited to be joined here by Vidhi.
She's on that edge distribution services team.
Hi Vidhi, it's great to see you.
>> Hi Pamela. It's super-exciting
to be here and thanks for having me.
>> Yeah, I'm super excited to deep dive
into device update for Azure IoT Hub.
As IoT continues to be adopted at increasing paces across
multiple industries and use cases it is super
necessary for anyone building IoT solutions.
That includes operators, developers,
customers to have a way to really
deploy these new features to meet their business cases.
I'm excited to have Vidhi,
really share what we're doing in this space to address,
updating all of these devices securely.
Vidhi could you give a little bit more information
about what is device update?
>> Yeah, definitely. Like I mentioned,
to realize the full benefits of IoTs digital transformation,
customers need a way to create,
maintain, and update their devices in a scalable manner.
Device update for IoT Hub does just that
by providing an end-to-end update solution that
enables customers to manage and
deploy updates to their IoT devices over the air.
This empowers them to respond rapidly to
security threats and deploy new features to meet
business requirements without the added cost
of building and maintaining their own update solution.
What we are doing is enabling the capability
to ingest and distribute updates over the air,
bringing the best of Windows
update that we've learned over the years like scalability,
security, and reliability to IoT while optimizing it for IoT.
>> Could you dig into a little bit more on how
you're leveraging the Windows updates and optimizing it for IoT?
>> Yeah, definitely. That's actually a great question.
One of the key things that we
wanted to do is bring the best of Windows update,
but still optimize it for IoT.
A consistent feedback that we've had from
customers is that these devices are in
managed solutions where their uptime is so
critical and the predictability around
these devices is of the utmost importance.
What we do with device update is provide capabilities so that
the customer is always in control of the updating process,
and choose which devices get updated and when.
Another key consideration that we've taken into
account when designing device update for IoT Hub
is that a lot of these IoT devices don't
always have the most reliable of network connectivity.
They could be deployed in the middle of a forest
somewhere or in a mine and
you can't assume that they'll
have reliable connectivity or have connectivity at all.
A unique offering the device update
brings is some of our optimizations around delivery.
Where we designed for resilient downloads and
even address the cases of disconnected devices
through our unique on-network cash offering.
We wanted to make sure that there's
a large ecosystem of IoT devices,
just like you mentioned.
We want as much as
management and orchestration of these updates to be Cloud
controlled as possible so that
the agents that are running on these clients are super
tiny and can scale down to the smallest
of devices in the IoT ecosystem.
>> I love that call-out for disconnecting devices.
I know we're going to have upcoming IoT Show, sure,
to dig into that more
because I know that's going to be a hot topic,
it always is in the IoT space.
I would love to see this in action.
Could do dig into the demo?
>> Yeah. Let's go ahead and look
at a quick demo of device update in action.
You can look at the Azure portal here.
I have the device update capability already enabled in my IoT Hub.
This solution is completely integrated on top of IoT Hubs,
so customers can easily get started
and integrated into any of their existing solution.
You can use the device update experience to publish updates,
group devices, and deploy them over the air.
One of the key things is we provide
this experience through Azure portal,
but customers can also choose to build
their own customer experience on top of our APIs.
I'm going to start off by importing an update.
In addition to choosing the update files,
I'm also going to the update metadata,
the update manifest file.
This includes information around
the compatibility and the applicability information.
This allows device update to determine
which update is best suited for a given device.
Then I can just go and select a storage container where I want
these updates to be hosted and import the update.
Usually, it can take a couple minutes for
the update to import successfully.
Here we can see that the update has been imported
successfully and is now ready to deploy.
The next thing that I can do is
take a look at my entire device environment,
including all the devices that are or the air update capable.
To take a look at this,
you would have to group devices based on IoT Hub tags.
Again, because of the integration of device update with IoT Hub,
you can use these tags for other services also.
Device update gives you,
at a glance view of all your devices that are
compliant and secure with
the latest update and you are devices that are not.
Here, I can see that I have
one device that's not on the latest update.
That device update determines this based on
the compatibility information that was
provided as part of the imported update,
as well as the device properties.
With a single click,
you can create a deployment to go to your group of devices.
Here you have all the control to select which devices get
the update and when the update is applied to the devices.
Once I've created the deployment,
I can monitor all the active deployments that I have going on
that are targeting different devices
that are part of my ecosystem.
Device update uses IoT Plug and Play to send and receive messages,
as well as properties from
the devices to the Cloud and vice versa.
>> When you say the device update
leverages IoT Plug and Play,
does that mean that customers need to make all
of their components IoT Plug and Play enabled?
>> That's a good question.
No. We don't require customers to make
all of their components Plug and Play enabled,
the leverage for a device up,
leverage IoT Plug and Play to discover and
manage devices that are ODA capable,
and then we also leverage Plug and Play interfaces to
send and receive messages from the device.
But we do not require customers to leverage Plug and Play
for all of the other agents or
components that they may have running on their device.
>> I'm wondering what device updates support.
Does it support OTAs, Linux,
what platforms can folks get started with?
>> Yeah, definitely.
With device update for IoT Hub,
we have a whole range of devices that we support,
from the smallest sensors to your gateway class edge devices.
We support directly connected devices,
as well as devices that are in complex topologies
where they're disconnected or nested on multiple levels.
We have support for Linux and OTAs
and all of our clients' agents are completely open-source,
so customers can take them and modify them
for any configuration that they have
their link in their device ecosystem.
>> That's great. I love seeing that flexibility.
>> Yeah, that's the plan.
So now we've been talking,
let's look at the device.
It should have finished updating by now.
In the device update portal experience,
you can also monitor the status of your deployments.
Let's look at this deployment here.
Yeah, I can see that my device has successfully applied the update
and my device environment is
now up-to-date using the new device update by the Hub feature.
>> That's great to see.
Thank you so much for showing us Device Update for Azure IoT Hub.
I'm excited to have people get started and play around with that.
I know your team,
yourself did a blog post that gives all of that information.
It sounds like people can go to aka.ms/iot-hub-device-update-blog.
That should be right
there for folks to check out
and thank you so much Vidhi for being here.
Giving us this preview,
a view of the Device Update
and we're really excited to get our hands on it.
>> Yeah, I was super excited to do this today.
Thank you so much for having me and
that you everybody out there for watching.
>> Yes. Thank you.
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