This post was authored by @Arpita Duppala, PM on the Core Operating System and Intelligent Edge team. Follow her @arnuwish on Twitter.

Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of Azure Blob Storage on IoT Edge—where this is deployed as a module to IoT devices via Azure IoT Edge. It is useful for data that need to be processed real-time on the device or stored and accessed as a blob locally—which can be sent to the cloud later.

Azure Blob Storage on IoT Edge uses the Azure Storage SDK to store data locally on a local blob store. This enables the application written to store and access data on public cloud Azure, to store and access data locally with a simple change of connection string in code.

Below is the list of supported container host operating system and architecture, available in Windows and Linux.

Azure Blob Storage on IoT Edge – Version 0.5 (September 24, 2018)

In the diagram below, we have an edge device pre-installed with Azure IoT Edge runtime. It is running a custom module to process the data collected from the sensor and saving the data to the local blob store. Because it is Azure-consistent, the custom module can be developed using the Azure Storage SDK to make calls to the local blob storage.

This scenario is useful when there is a lot of data to process. For example, a farm has cameras (sensor) in which the images are processed or filtered at the edge by a custom module such that it captures notable events, like a cow running wild on a farm. It is efficient to do this processing locally because there is a lot of image data that is continuously being captured. Azure Blob Storage on IoT Edge module allows you to store and access such data efficiently.

Current Functionality:

With the current public preview module, the users can:

• Store data locally and access the local blob store using the Azure Storage SDK.
• Reuse the same business logic of an app written to store/access data on Azure.
• Deploy in an IoT Edge device.
• Use any Azure IoT Edge Tier 1 host operating system

Roadmap:

What does the future hold?

• Automatically copy the data to Azure from IoT edge device
• Automatically copy the data from Azure to IoT edge device
• Additional API support
• Early adopter deployment scenarios

More Information:

Find more information about this module at https://aka.ms/AzureBlobStorage-IotModule

Feedback:

Please share your feedback with us and let us know how we can improve. You can also let us know if you find that we are missing some major API support which is required in your scenario.

You can reach out to us at absiotfeedback@microsoft.com