Book Image

Hands-On Azure Digital Twins

By : Alexander Meijers
Book Image

Hands-On Azure Digital Twins

By: Alexander Meijers

Overview of this book

In today’s world, clients are using more and more IoT sensors to monitor their business processes and assets. Think about collecting information such as pressure in an engine, the temperature, or a light switch being turned on or off in a room. The data collected can be used to create smart solutions for predicting future trends, creating simulations, and drawing insights using visualizations. This makes it beneficial for organizations to make digital twins, which are digital replicas of the real environment, to support these smart solutions. This book will help you understand the concept of digital twins and how it can be implemented using an Azure service called Azure Digital Twins. Starting with the requirements and installation of the Azure Digital Twins service, the book will explain the definition language used for modeling digital twins. From there, you'll go through each step of building digital twins using Azure Digital Twins and learn about the different SDKs and APIs and how to use them with several Azure services. Finally, you'll learn how digital twins can be used in practice with the help of several real-world scenarios. By the end of this book, you'll be confident in building and designing digital twins and integrating them with various Azure services.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Section 1: Azure Digital Twin Essentials
4
Section 2: Getting Started with Azure Digital Twins
11
Section 3: Digital Twins Advanced Techniques
19
Section 4: Digital Twin Implementations in Real-world Scenarios

Data ingress and egress

When working with integrations around Azure Digital Twins, the terms data ingress and data egress will often appear. But what do they mean and what is the difference? Let's take a look:

  • Data ingress: This is about ingesting data into an Azure digital twin by receiving data and events from upstream services.
  • Data egress: This is about routing data from an Azure digital twin to connected endpoints such as Azure Event Hub, Azure Event Grid, and Azure Service Bus. Downstream services will be connected to one of those endpoints to get the data for different purposes.

We will explain event routes and endpoints later in this chapter. Data ingress and data egress have a lot to do with upstream and downstream services. Let's explain upstream and downstream services.

Upstream services such as Azure IoT Hub and Azure Logic Apps allow us to receive data and update an Azure digital twin. To ingest data from any of these sources, it is common...