Publish your Azure IoT Edge modules in Azure Marketplace

We recently announced the general availability of Azure IoT Edge, allowing you to deploy cloud workloads like AI and machine learning to run directly on your IoT devices. We are further simplifying IoT Edge for our ecosystem with programs like certification of 3rd party edge hardware and a centralized edge module marketplace. Today, we are excited to announce the ability for 3rd parties to publish Azure IoT Edge modules to the Azure Marketplace.

IoT solutions are composed of many individual capabilities including:

• Reading data from devices that speak specific protocols like OPC UA, SNMP, Modbus, and more.
• Providing industrial grade data storage options, like Redis Cache or Azure Blob Storage.
• Performing high value AI on device data, like image recognition.
• Visualizing insights captured from data, with solutions like Aveva’s Human Machine Interface (HMI).

Customers creating solutions may not have the expertise or want to spend the time to write each of these capabilities themselves. Including IoT Edge modules in the Azure Marketplace allows the IoT ecosystem to buy and sell capabilities which help end-to-end solutions get to market faster.

What’s in it for solution developers?

Exposing IoT Edge modules in the marketplace is a boon for developers creating solutions. They now have one simple place to discover all the capabilities that can be deployed to an IoT Edge device. These modules are certified for quality and scanned for security vulnerabilities, giving developers confidence in the stability and security of code they use in their solutions.

What’s in it for publishers?

The benefits to publish your modules to Azure Marketplace are to publicize and monetize your IP. The Azure Marketplace is one of the few marketplaces with IoT-specific capabilities. Thus, it’s the place where thousands of developers will go to find the capabilities they need in their IoT solutions.

Today, we’re partnering with Aveva, Alleantia, and Codit to simplify the discovery of devices, capture data from devices, and visualize it locally. We’re also partnering with Redis to provide a solution to store metadata with fast-performance, light-weight constraints, and Azure Blob Storage to store large files locally.

For many 3rd parties creating IoT capabilities, creating billing systems and tracking software usage is not a core competency. In our next steps, we will solve these problems as well! Currently the marketplace supports free and “bring your own license” offers for IoT Edge modules. However, soon we’ll allow modules to choose various options for Azure to bill anyone using the module. This will happen securely, automatically, and without the module author writing a bunch of sensitive billing logic.

We’re excited to continue reviewing module submissions and seeing the great solutions people create with Azure IoT Edge. To learn more, solution developers can review both Microsoft and 3rd party IoT Edge modules today. Get started today with directions for publishing a module to the marketplace.

Source: IoT