Architecting IoT Solutions on Azure

Chapter 9. Hot Path Data Processing

After a theory-heavy Chapter 8, here you’ll get a break from noodling and actually build something—actually four things—that all pretty much do the same thing but in four different ways using four different services on Azure. Since IoT data is largely event-driven and message-oriented in the form of telemetry and events, hot paths are right at home in IoT workloads. In looking at the IoT Landscape, this chapter is zooming in on the top horizontal bar as seen in Figure 9-1. The horizontal bars represent data processing pathways from when data is landed on Azure to the point where it is presented in a consumable fashion.

Figure 9-1. The hot path on the IoT Landscape

Messaging Platforms

In the last chapter, you learned that data processing is all about moving data from a source to a destination, or a sink, and that data may be changed in some way. Messaging, as you learned in Chapter 8, is an integral part of data movement. We covered messaging platforms for data movement purposes in Chapter 4. There, you learned how Azure IoT Hub brokers connections with devices and then routes messages to several different messaging platforms, including Azure Event Hubs, Azure Event Grid, Azure Service Bus, and Azure Queue Storage. Each platform has a different use case, depending on what you’re trying to do.

With a hot path, a messaging platform moves data ...