Introducing Azure IoT Hub device streams

#News(IoTStack) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Azure IoT Hub device streams is a new PaaS service that addresses these needs by providing a foundation for secure end-to-end connectivity to IoT devices. Customers, partners, application developers, and third-party platform providers can leverage device streams to communicate securely with IoT devices that reside behind firewalls or are deployed inside of private networks.
At its core, an IoT Hub device stream is a data transfer tunnel that provides connectivity between two TCP/IP-enabled endpoints: one side of the tunnel is an IoT device and the other side is a customer endpoint that intends to communicate with the device (the latter is referred here as service endpoint). We have seen many setups where direct connectivity to a device is prohibited based on the organization’s security policies and connectivity restrictions placed on its networks. These restrictions, while justified, frequently impact various legitimate scenarios that require connectivity to an IoT device.
Examples of these scenarios include:
• An operator wishes to login to a device for inspection or maintenance. This scenario commonly involves logging to the device using Secure Shell (SSH) for Linux and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) for Windows. The device or network firewall configurations often block the operator’s workstation from reaching the device.
• An operator needs to remotely access device’s diagnostics portal for troubleshooting. Diagnostic portals are typically in the form of a web server hosted on the device. A device’s private IP or its firewall configuration may similarly block the user from interacting with the device’s web server.
• An application developer needs to remotely retrieve logs and other runtime diagnostic information from a device’s file system. Protocols commonly used for this purpose may include File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or Secure Copy (SCP), among others. Again, the firewall configurations typically restrict these types of traffic.
IoT Hub device streams address the end-to-end connectivity needs of the above scenarios by leveraging an IoT Hub cloud endpoint that acts as a proxy for application traffic exchanged between the device and service.

• Device and service endpoints each create separate outbound connections to an IoT Hub endpoint that acts as a proxy for the traffic being transmitted between them.
• IoT Hub endpoint will relay traffic packets sent from device to service and vice-versa. This establishes an end-to-end bidirectional tunnel through which device and service applications can communicate.
• The established tunnel through IoT Hub provides reliable and ordered packet delivery guarantees.
Ease of use in private network setups: Devices that are deployed inside of private networks can be reached without the need to assign publicly routable IP addresses to each device.

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