Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

This post is focusing on Device Twins that are available on Azure IoT Hub. If it is your first time when you hear about Azure IoT Hub, than you should know that Azure IoT Hub is a powerfull serviced offered by Azure that can connect, manage and monitor your devices. More information about it can be found on Azure site Why Device Twins? When we are working with devices, we will find all the time information that is specific to individual device. Information like device serial number, customer information, location, device configuration is part of this type of information. In an ideal world, we should have a unique location where all this data is stored. No custom code of functionality should be developed by us. Azure IoT Hub is offering this to us through Device Twins. What are Device Twins? It’s a collection of properties that specific for each individual device. Device twins contains 3 types of structure (where the last two are similar, but have different roles) Tags : Devi...

In one of my latest post I presented how we can establish a PuTTy connection between two different machines through Azure Relay Hybrid Connection using web sockets . Today, we will take a look over a Node.JS sample that initiate the tunnel that can be used for an RDP connection between two machines over Azure Relay. Context Before jumping to the solution let's take a look on RDP Connection Sequence ( https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc240452.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 ). As we can see in the connection sequence flow, there are multiple connections that are open during a RDP session. The initial session that is open between client and server is used for the initial handshake and credentials validation. Once the credential are validated, the current connection is closed and other socket connection are open automatically. In the current sample, we will update the original one that was written for Telnet. The first 5 steps from the flow will be supported, until...

Durring 18th and 19th of November, another edition of ITDays  took place in Cluj-Napoca. This was the 4th edition of ITDays. In comparison with other years, this edition was not only bigger, but the quality of speakers and the content was much better. I would even say that ITDays evolved in a good conference where you can find good quality content. I had a great time and I hope that we will meet next year to. I was invited at ITDays to talk about Docker on Windows. The most funny thing was that I prepared the slides 3 weeks before the event. During this period Docker team together with Microsoft released some new features for Windows and I had to update my slides and demos. Title: Docker + .NET Core Demos Abstract : Come to join a 30 minutes demo, where we will discover how we can work with Docker and .NET Core, how we can run Docker on Linux and Windows and what are the most important commands that we shall know. At the end of the session we identify 3 cases when...

Last day I was invited to another Codecamp Conference , that took place in Cluj-Napoca. Like other Codecamp Conferences, the event was very big, with more than 1.000 participants and 70 sessions. There were 10 tracks in parallel, so it was pretty hard to decide at  what session you want to join. It was great to join this conference and I hope that you discovered something new during the conference. At this event I talked about Azure IoT Hub and how we can use it to connect devices from the field. I had a lot of demos using Raspberry PI 3 and Simplelink SensorTag. Most of the samples were written in C++ and Node.JS and people were impressed that even if we are using Microsoft technologies, we are not limited to C# and .NET. World and Microsoft are changing so fast. Just looking and Azure IoT Hub and new features that were launched and I'm pressed (Jobs, Methods, Device Twin). On backend my demos covered Stream Analytics, Event Hub, Azure Object Storage and DocumentDB. Title ...

A few days ago I wrote a short post about Relay Hybrid Connection (using Azure Relay), that enable us to establish a secure tunnel connection between two different computers, that can be located anywhere in the world. The connection is done over HTTPS using web sockets. This means that even if you have firewalls, as long as port 443 is open, you can have a secure connection out of the box. A short description of Relay Hybrid Connection can be found in the previous post Secure tunnel using Hybrid Connections . Scope In today post let's see how we can establish a Telnet connection between two different computers using Relay Hybrid Connection and Node.JS. Why Telnet? I decided to make this sample using Telnet, because a connection through Telnet requires a direct connection to a specific port. Having such a connection requires as to redirect content that is send to a a port directly to Azure Relay. If we can do such a thing, than we can redirect the VNC or RDP port without a ...

I observed an interesting trend in a few last years. Even if more and more companies migrate to cloud providers like Azure or migrate to IoT era, a common requirement that still popups for all clients is the need of a secure tunnel - Remote Screen Sharing, FTP, Remote Access and so on. In the end the requirement is simple but very hard to fulfill. The need of a secure tunnel (like a VPN) between their devices or systems to their backends. When you combine this with scalability and integration with different system it can become an expensive and complicated nightmare. If you look in my past post , you’ll see that I played with different solutions like Service Bus Relay and OpenSSL. Hybrid Connections But now, it seems that Microsoft made a surprise for us – Hybrid Connections . This is a new feature of Azure Service Bus Relays that allows us to create a point-to-point connection in a secure and reliable way. Before jumping to code, let’s see why I am so excited about it. From the...

We are leaving in a word where each new type of device appears every few minutes. IoT is still a buzz word, but not for long. Our world is so use to with IoT, devices and connectivity we cannot imagine our world without them. Big players’ world Enterprises started to look at IoT and how they can connect their assets to the internet for a while. Around us a lot of moving in this area. We see not only consumer devices, but also factories and other kind of assets that are starting to meet each other. This transition is normal and companies can win a lot from it. Insights information about their systems, cost optimization and predictable maintenance are only some of the drivers of this trend. Assets size Inside a factory, it is normal to have a dashboard where you can see the state of all devices in real time. But how many devices and sensors a factory has, 10.000, 50.000, 250.000? Does a support team can manage a factory of this size, or than factories of this size? If we co...