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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :-)
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
This comment breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to insinuate astroturfing without evidence.
When we find actual astroturfing we crack down on it, but it's not ok to poison the threads by putting that label on views you happen to disagree with.
In enterprise there is two real options for cloud, azure and aws. Both are great, but a lot of us chose azure because we were already Microsoft shops.
Their support is excellent, you pay for it so that’s kind of natural, but if I submit an issue with a high importance rating they’ll be on the phone with me on the hour until it’s solved with no extra cost to me.
From a European perspective Microsoft were the first to adopt EU legislation. They were also the first to offer “private” azure hosting, where your data isn’t held on servers shared with anyone as well as letting you physically inspect your servers at the azure data farm. (Amazon does all this as well now, but they didn’t when we were chosing cloud.)
I’m extremely satisfied with how they operate for enterprise, how they adopt other technologies as first class citizens in their offered stack (we use a lot of python), and how accessible they are. It’s not just for support, if I want something added or changed I can ask them, and often it happens.
I really, really hate windows 10 though, so there is that. :p
Azure is not that great to be honest. Last time I used it (a couple of years ago), it happened to me that my VM was shut down and they sent me an email. Apparently the real hardware it was running in had a problem. That won't happen in AWS, where your VM will be automatically be moved to another server on the fly and you won't even notice.
> That won't happen in AWS, where your VM will be automatically be moved to another server on the fly and you won't even notice.
Uh, what? Literally had that happen to a tiny micro a year back. Fortunately it was quick to recover from (I was using elastic beanstalk at the time) but this happens on AWS.
I'm not defending nor using Azure, but what you described happened to me two years ago on AWS. VM shut down due to hardware failure and I got an email requiring manual intervention from my side (starting the VM).
Microsoft is a company whose three traditional strengths were Windows, Office, and Server. The first is toast and Microsoft lost in mobile, and the second is getting crushed by Google Apps. Power makes companies bad -- Microsoft was bad when they have power, Facebook, Google, and Amazon are bad now that they have power. Microsoft is weaker than they have ever been and thus they are behaving better than they ever have.
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.
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.
