v0.2.0-preview

Release Notes

Data Processor:

• Service account token expiration causing data communication loss between MQ and data processor has been fixed.

MQ

• The issue of service account token expiration, which caused a loss of connection between IoT MQ and other pods, has been resolved.
• These observability metrics are now available:
  • aio_mq_backend_replicas
  • aio_mq_backend_replicas_current
  • aio_mq_frontend_replicas
  • aio_mq_frontend_replicas_current

OPC-UA Broker

• Akri OPC UA asset discovery now works on the first run after AIO deployment.
• Deletion and modification of assets in the Digital Operations Experience portal works as expected.
• Telemetry encoding does not switch to gzip occasionally.

v0.1.0-preview

Overview:

Azure IoT Operations is a suite of Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes services that provide wide-ranging and secure functionality. Azure IoT Operation enables: 

• Workload orchestration with simplified deployment, configuration, and management on the Arc Enabled Kubernetes clusters from the cloud. 
• Projection and management of industrial assets on the Edge as Azure-native resources in the cloud. 
• Simplified and secured real-time data transfer from OPC-UA servers using an industrial grade OPC-UA broker. 
• Spec-compliant MQTT data plane via an industrial-grade, distributed and scalable broker.
• North-bound cloud data plane connectors that enable bi-directional or uni-directional data flow from the edge broker to services like Azure Event Hub (Kafka), Azure Event Grid MQTT, and Azure Data Lake storage. 
• Seamless support for Dapr programming model (pub/sub and statestore) to integrate custom workloads like ML inferencing, interface with existing databases etc.  
• Read raw data from various data sources and assets, normalize and contextualize in near real time. Write the clean data to various edge and cloud destinations to obtain true value out of industrial data. 
• Manage assets, subscribe to asset data, and configure your data processing pipelines from Azure cloud using Azure IoT Operations experience. 
• Secure communication between devices and the cloud through isolated network environments based on the ISA-95/Purdue Network architecture. 
• Upload clean data to Microsoft Fabric and get insights using a wide variety of big data platforms in the cloud. 
• Discovery of devices and data sources at the edge which are exposed as resources in your local cluster namespace using Akri. 
• Observability of the platform health and metrics through curated dashboards. 

Release Notes:

• Integration with Azure key vault for seamless secret management. 
• Ability to ingest data from Microsoft SQL Server & HTTP Endpoint. 
• Ability to configure asset events from Azure IoT Operations experience, a flexible and efficient way to signal state changes and lay foundation for alarm systems.  
• Ability to manage and create asset endpoint profiles, includes OPCUA server metadata, user/secret, and server transport certificate references, from the Azure IoT Operations experience.  
• Ability to paginate in Azure IoT Operations experience pages that contain lists. 
• Ability to view asset details from Azure portal.

Validated Environments

Azure Iot Operations ships as a set of Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes services and is intended for use with CNCF conformant Arc validated partner products. Currently, Microsoft has validated Azure IoT Operations against the following fixed-set of infrastructures and environments:

Environment	Version
AKS-EE on Windows 11 IoT Enterprise on a single-node AMD Ryzen-7 (8 core, 3.3 GHz), 16-GB RAM	AksEdge-K3s-1.26.6-1.4.109.0
K3s on Ubuntu 22.04.2 on a single-node AMD Ryzen-7 (8 core, 3.3 GHz), 16-GB RAM	K3s version 1.27.3

See also the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes system requirements.