One of the things I played around with ESP8266 and Azure IoTHub was, how I can get the whole infrastructure deployable and also to get the code working for other devs, without sharing my Azure environment and credentials.
The main problem was, to keep all modules decoupled from each other, so that the IoT device (here my ESP8266) can reach my Azure Endpoints all the time, either endpoints have changed by redeployments or new devices are added.
So I started developing the following architecture:
As you can see, the device first tries by connecting over WiFi to reach the Azure backend, that is a function. That functions responsibility is to create a device identity. If it does not exists, it will be created and then the function sends back the device’s identity together with a new endpoint. That endpoint directs to a storage account containing the up to date firmware as a blob.
So, on receiving the identity and the storage endpoint, the device can now connect to the storage, downloads the firmware and starts flashing. After the flash process is done, the device tries to connect to Azure IoT Hub. If connection has been successful established, it starts sending telemetry data (here it is temperature and fake battery level) to IoT Hub.
When now a new firmware is ready for flash on productive devices, an administrator or so is able, to send an update command, with what all connected devices can set their self to firmware update mode and start downloading/ flashing process. That’s all!
With this approach my devices are decoupled from the backend. The only one thing I need is a little piece of code, that enables my device to find the first endpoint. But with that, I can start deleting my Azure resource group and redeploy it, as long I have fun doing it. And fortunately, I can use this, to also share my code and deployment scripts, without sharing any secrets 🙂
This is, what DevOps is for. Making life easier and safer. If you like to, take part on my project and contribute. This version of code and deployment is a draft. There is a lot of things to do, to get this smooth and fluent. So, everyone is welcome to adjust and optimize the code and get things right. https://github.com/totosan/DevOpsIoT
