Microsoft releases open-source Azure IoT Gateway SDK in beta

Microsoft today announced the availability of the beta version of the Azure IoT Gateway software development kit (SDK) to make it easier to connect devices to the Internet. The SDK was previously in a private preview after being announced during Microsoft’s Build developer conference in March. Now it’s available on GitHub under an open source MIT license.

An IoT gateway is a piece of hardware that connects to remote devices but also hooks up directly to the Internet. The SDK is intended to aid development for it.

“The Azure IoT Gateway SDK does not place restrictions on the type of gateway solution that can be created,” Sam George, partner director, for Azure IoT at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. “Our IoT philosophy is to support the many different types of operating systems and hardware developers use, so we’ve built the gateway with ANSI C on top of a platform abstraction layer, providing a high performance gateway framework with a portable and cross-platform library that runs on both Windows and Linux.”

The idea is to add support for C#, Java, and Node.js, George wrote.

This isn’t the first open source SDK for working with IoT devices in association with Microsoft’s Azure public cloud. Microsoft has previously released Azure IoT device SDKs for C, Java, .NET, Node, and Python.

Competing cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services has its own AWS IoT service with open source embedded C and JavaScript SDKs. Salesforce and Oracle also have cloud IoT services.

Documentation for the SDK is here.

Also today, Microsoft announced the preview for device management in the Azure IoT Hub service, which was also first announced at Build.