Microsoft announced a new integration with update manager Mender. Mender provides over-the-air (OTA) update management, while Azure IoT Hub provides capabilities for developers to build device management into IoT devices.
The new integration will provide a single location for managing device registration. According to Mender, a challenge organizations often run into is building a firmware and update mechanism for deployed devices. They often hastily assemble a mechanism that overlooks some of the nuances of the update process, such as code signing, encrypted communication channels, and resiliency.
Because of this, organizations will be able to easily correlate analytics between Azure and Mender, as well as minimize the number of secret key credentials needed.
The integration will allow operators to monitor IoT device states and analytics in Azure IoT Hub, and assign and deploy updates to those devices through Mender.
Part of the collaboration is a new tutorial on how to perform over-the-air software updates for Azure IoT Hub.
“In developing today’s Internet of Things (IoT) products, support for both analytics and software updates are paramount. This combination enables product and support teams to quickly detect and remediate issues, and to address unforeseen customer behavior. For example, a support team can detect an application producing a higher volume of error logs from IoT analytics data before it ever impacts the end user. Once the issue is successfully diagnosed and fixed, a patch can be deployed to all devices with over-the-air (OTA) software updates,” Mender wrote in a blog post.
