Setting up Azure IoT Hub

What is Azure IoT Hub?

You can find the official description on the Microsoft Website. Speaking in IT terms it is basically a message broker (like a MQTT broker) with benefits.

When connecting with the United Manufacturing Hub we will substitute the VerneMQ broker (see also architecture) in the United Manufacturing Hub with Azure IoT Hub.

Tutorial

Prerequisites

• Basic knowledge about IT / OT, Azure and the difference between symmetric and asymmetric encryption

Step 1: Create the necessary PKI (can be skipped if using symmetric encryption)

We recommend to skip this step if you are new to IT / Public-Key-Infrastructure and just want to see some data in Azure. We strongly advise to not use in production.

There are two options / tutorials to get started:

1. our tutorial on setting up a PKI infrastructure (recommended, as it can be used in production as well). Replace the server URL with your Azure IoT Hub URL and ensure that you use the device IDs as MQTT client id.
2. use the official Microsoft tutorial (only for testing)

Step 2: Create Azure IoT Hub

Follow the official guide. You can use the free plan for the beginning, which will be sufficient to test everything.

When using asymmetric encryption: when creating a new device select X.509 as authentication type.

What to do now?

We recommend you to connect the United Manufacturing Hub with Azure IoT Hub as a next step.