Running ML.Net models inside an Azure IoT Edge module

Getting started with machine learning is not easy. This is the domain of the Data Scientist and to understand the different models leads you into trying to understand the mathematical part of it.

Still, if you see a machine learning model as a black box, things start to get a little bit easier.

One of the solutions Microsoft offers to developers for getting familiar with machine learning, training models, and deploying them with code, is ML.Net.

Or as Microsoft says:

With ML.NET, you can create custom ML models using C# or F# without having to leave the .NET ecosystem.

In fact, it runs on .Net Core so technically, this should run on multiple operating systems, including Linux; on Intel and Arm processors…

Let’s see how to start with ML.Net and how to integrate it with Azure IoT Edge

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Connecting child devices to the Azure IoT transparent Edge gateway

Getting started with Azure IoT Edge is easy. Microsoft offers quite some tutorials for several operating systems for setting up an edge gateway.

Once you have created your first IoT edge solution and played with it, you discover Azure IoT Edge takes a bit more time to master.

In real-life IoT is hard, though…

This is because there are more moving parts like security, provisioning, managing, monitoring, etc.

For example, take a look at the ‘iotedge check’ output on your edge device:

This feature of the iotedge runtime makes it possible to check how well your runtime is hardened against common scenarios where something can fail (eg. running out of disk space due to extensive logging or firewall blockades for certain protocols).

In this case, a message is shown which indicates the runtime is using a development (x509) certificate which will expire within ninety days. Communication between the edge modules will stop after that date. A reboot/restart of the runtime is needed to get the runtime running again for another ninety days.

What is the purpose of this certificate and why do we need this to be fixed?

As seen in the documentation:

IoT Edge certificates are used by the modules and downstream IoT devices to verify the identity and legitimacy of the IoT Edge hub runtime module

So, apart from the secure connection with the cloud (either with a symmetric key, x509 certificate, or a TPM endorsement), this certificate is used to secure the communication between modules and possible edge devices. If the certificate expires, edge communication comes to a hold.

Let’s check out how to ruggedize the communication.