Microsoft begins selling Azure IoT Starter Kits from $50 to $160

Microsoft today announced at its Build developer conference that it’s now selling five new Azure IoT Starter Kits, which are available for as little as $50 each.

There are an Adafruit Raspberry Pi Kit, an Adafruit Feather M0 Kit, an Adafruit Huzzah Feather ESP8266 Kit, Seeed’s Intel Edison Kit, and the SparkFun Thing Dev Kit.

“These kits allow anyone with Windows or Linux experience to quickly build IoT prototypes that leverage all Azure’s IoT offerings,” Microsoft said in a statement. Each kit comes with a development board that’s compliant with the Azure Certified for IoT program, along with sensors, actuators, and tutorials.

The idea of selling a kit like this isn’t completely novel. Public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced Grove IoT Starter Kits powered by AWS at its re:Invent conference in October.

The Azure IoT Suite was first announced about a year ago, and last month the Azure IoT Hub, a key part of the portfolio, came out of public preview.

In addition, there’s a new tool called the Azure IoT Gateway SDK, which simplifies the process of connecting older devices to the Internet. And now the Azure IoT Hub has a public preview of device management, too.

Update at 1:39 p.m. Pacific: Added that device management is part of the Azure IoT Hub.