Global Azure Bootcamp – Atos Amstelveen – April 25, 2020 [nld-eng]

Welcome to the “Intelligent Cloud, Intelligent Edge”

[english version below]

De Global Azure Bootcamp is een wereldwijd evenement welke plaats vindt op meer dan 250 locaties op één dag. Hierbij krijgen geïnteresseerden inzicht in wat de Azure Cloud voor hen kan bieden en leren zij hoe ze kunnen beginnen met software-ontwikkeling in de Cloud.

Atos organiseert, in samenwerking met de Nederlandse Azure IoT Community, voor inmiddels de vierde keer de Global Azure Bootcamp op haar hoofdkantoor te Amstelveen.

Traditioneel ligt bij ons de focus op de combinatie van Azure en Internet of Things. Kom naar onze locatie als je geïnteresseerd bent in IoT en als je wilt weten welke mogelijkheden de Microsoft Azure IoT je biedt.

Er worden naast prikkelende presentaties ook verschillende workshops van diverse niveaus gegeven.

Een voorbeeld is de door ons ontwikkelde workshop waarbij jouw laptop in een IoT Edge gateway verandert. Hierbij krijgt je de kans om op eenvoudige wijze data uit een industrieel Modbus device naar de Cloud te brengen.

En we hebben wederom de workshop rond LoRa en Azure op het programma staan.

Onze Atos Azure IoT platform experts zijn aanwezig voor IoT whiteboard sessies. Of je nu vragen hebt over domotica, LoRa, open source, CI/CD, protocollen of industriële IoT: we gaan samen op zoek naar het juiste antwoord op al jouw vragen. Dus breng je eigen projecten en usecases mee, daag ons uit!

Onze Global Azure Bootcamp dag is gratis toegangkelijk!

De agenda voor de dag ziet er als volgt uit:

9.00 Inloop + ontvangst

10.00 Opening

12.00 Lunch

16.30 Tombola + Afsluiting met een hapje en drankje

Tussendoor zijn er dus meerdere labs, workshops en natuurlijk presentaties over IoT (op de Eventbrite wordt deze agenda nog verder aangevuld).

Neem dus je laptop mee zodat je actief mee kunt doen. Voor de labs en workshops is een installatie van Visual Studio 2019 of Visual Studio Code nodig. Wie nog geen Azure account heeft krijgt zonder verdere verplichtingen de beschikking over een Azure pass. 

Ons adres is (gratis parkere):

Atos Nederland

Burgemeester Rijnderslaan 30, 1185 MC Amstelveen

https://atos.net/nl/nederland

Route

Neem een geldig legitimatiebewijs mee voor toegang tot ons kantoor

Registeer op https://gabc-2020-atos.eventbrite.com

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The Global Azure Bootcamp is a global event that takes place at more than 250 locations in one day. Attendees will get the latest insights about what Azure Cloud can mean for them and they learn how they can start with software development in the Cloud.

Atos proudly presents, together with the Dutch Azure IoT Community,, for the fourth time, the Global Azure Bootcamp at its headquarters in Amstelveen.

Traditionally, our focus is set on the combination of Azure and the Internet of Things. Come to our location if you are interested in IoT and if you want to know what Microsoft Azure IoT can bring you.

Both interesting presentations and workshops. on several levels, are offered.

One example is the workshop we created on how to turn your laptop into a IoT Edge gateway. You get a chance to extract data from an industrial Modbus device in a simple way and send it to the cloud.

As usual, we also offer our popular workshop with LoRa and Azure.

Our Atos Azure IoT platform experts are available for IoT whiteboard sessions. All questions about either domotica, LoRa, open source, CI/CD, protocols or industriële IoT can be asked: Together we find out the best fitting answer for all your questions. So bring your own projects and usecases, challenge us!

Access to our Global Azure Bootcamp event is free!

The agenda for this day:

9.00 Entrance

10.00 Opening of the day

12.00 Lunch

16.30 Tombola + drinks

Multiple labs, workshops and presentations about IoT are made available during the day (we update our agenda at our Eventbrite site regularly). If needed, we can offer English spoken presentations. 

So do not forget to bring your laptop with you to participate actively. For most of the labs and workshops an installation of Visual Studio 2019 or Visual Studio Code is required. If you do not have an Azure account yet, an Azure pass will be offered without obligations. 

Our address is (free parking):

Atos Nederland

Burgemeester Rijnderslaan 30, 1185 MC Amstelveen

https://atos.net/nl/nederland

Route

You need a valid ID to get access to our office

Register at https://gabc-2020-atos.eventbrite.com

IoT Edge Docker Module with GPIO support on RPi

The C# .Net Core framwork is pretty versatile. Next to all the operating system features and Windows features, it also supports GPIO for a variety of devices: Raspberry PI, Hummingboard, Windows 10 (core), etc.

I was interested in to access the GPIO in an Azure IoT Edge solution.

I am aware of the elevated rights needed. It’s the same with serial ports access I encountered in the past.

So I did a test, quite simular to the seup of this GPIO introduction:

Let’s check out how we can get this runnning in an IoT Edge module.

Connecting your SenseCAP sensor to The Things Network

If you are interested in measuring IoT telemetry using an ultra low power wide area sensor network solution, the Seeed SenseCAP is an viable choice.

Seeed offers a number of sensors for agriculture and industrial environments, connected to a LoRa network.

I got my hand on this TH sensor, able to read air temperature and air humidity, sending it to the nearest LoRa gateway:

Seeed provides a portal for thier sensors called SenseCAP Software. But other LoRa platforms are supported too.

In this blog, I show you how to connect this sensor to The Things Network LoRa backend.

Securing inbound and outbound ports for Azure IoT

The Azure IoT Hub is able to support a high number of IoT devices, all communicating with their own personal secure connection.

The Azure IoT Hub supports both MQTTs, AMQPs and HTTPs as transport protocols. It’s even possible to communication MQTTs and AMQPs over websockets for Azure IoT Edge.

No, it’s not possible to transfer IoT telemetry and commands without TLS supported communication.

But what if a hacker tries to spoof a device, or our IoT Hub?

How can we be sure that received telemetry is coming from genuine devices? And can we limit the device communication to our own Azure resources?

Do you know who you are talking against?

Let’s see how we can make Azure IoT yet a little bit more secure.

Subscribe your IoTHub to EventGrid as event source

Azure has all sorts of Publisher/Subscriber resources available to allow sending and receiving messages (events) within Azure. Think of the Service Bus, EventHub, Storage Queue, Stream Analytics, Azure Functions, etc.

At some point, Microsoft realized that a more formal way of the eventing abilities of these resources was needed.

This let to the introduction of the EventGrid, one overall solution to send and receive messages. Azure Event Grid relatively new.

The Azure Event Grid allows you to easily build applications with event-based architectures

The Azure resources are divided into two groups:

• Event sources. Resources which produce events (or pass-through events)
• Event handlers. Resources which are able to pick up events and do something with them

These resources all come together in the Event Grid.

The Azure IoT Hub can act like an Event Source too. The events exposed are:

Let’s see how we can put this to use.

Using OPC-Twin for OPC-UA discovery and sending back commands

In the past, I have written multiple blogs about implementing OPC-UA on IoT Edge.

Until now I have written about collecting OPC-UA values and sending them to the cloud using the OPC Publisher.

But this OPC Publisher is actually just a small part of what Microsoft is actually offering regarding OPC-UA.

Microsoft has a team in both Redmond (USA) and Munich (Germany) working on Industrial IoT. Everything they produce is open source. You can find thier work on github.

With the OPC Twin, they also make it possible to discover, register and manage your Industrial Assets with Azure IoT and most of it can be done zero-touch.

Look at this diagram covering OPC-AU on Azure:

To the left, we see a OPC-UA server and an IoT Edge gateway. This is ‘living’ on the factory network. In the middle we see the Azure IoT Hub acting as cloud gateway and to the right, we see the OPC-UA backend which is provided by the IIoT team.

Of course, all of this is open source. And out of the box, a lot is already working.

OPC-UA, the full round trip

In this blog, I want to show how we can discover OPC-UA servers, update the OPC Publisher to read new nodes (exposed by the discovered servers) and I want to send commands back to the OPC-UA servers.

Alternatives for the default IoT Edge VM based on Ubuntu 16.04

In a recent blog, I showed how to set up an Azure IoT Edge Virtual Machine. These VMs are great for testing your IoT platform with ‘actual’ gateways.

This default, recommended, Azure VM is based on 16.04 LTS version of Ubuntu:

This is still a great solution but just this month, Microsoft announced .Net Core 3.1. This is the next long-term supported (LTS) release.

The current IoT Edge is based on .Net Core 2.1, the current LTS version. That’s why sourcecode, specifically written in .Net Core 2.2, was not able to be used in the Module templates.

So it’s safe to assume, that in the near future IoT Edge will have an upgrade towards .Net Core 3.1.

The release blog came with this little note with a rather big impact:

Note: Please ensure that .NET Core 3.1 ARM64 deployments use Linux kernel 4.14 version or later. For example, Ubuntu 18.04 satisfies this requirement, but 16.04 does not.

So the current VM will not last very long anymore. You will need a new VM template, based on eg. Ubuntu 18.04.

Note: current IoT Edge Gateways rolled out with the Ubuntu 16.04 OS in test, acceptance or even production situations have te be upgraded soon to before the IoT Edge Runtime can be upgraded. So check the operating systems that come with the Industrial PCs you buy from your hardware vendor.

Let’s see how to start with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on a VM.