What is Azure Sphere?

Question

There's lots of activity on Element14 relating to the Azure Sphere. I'd like to start paying more attention to the blogs but I have no idea what Azure actually is apart from it has a very nice name . At this point I could delve into Google or Microsoft literature but I thought it might be fun for the community members to sum it up in a simple paragraph or two.

Any volunteers to tell me in their own words what Azure Sphere is, what it can do and how I might use one? Think of this as the start of any blog post you might write.

Fred27 · Accepted Answer

I'll try. It's a Linux-based (yes, really) Single Board Computer from Microsoft designed with security foremost. Development is done in Visual Studio but is Linux/C rather than Windows/C#. You need to permanently tie it to an Azure subscription to allow Over The Air deployments and OS updates. This makes it perfect for a company who is for instance monitoring a load of vending machines reporting back stock levels, etc. They can be sure the software on there can be updated remotely and can't be hijacked. This security-first approach does mean that it's a much harder to get started compared with something like a Raspberry Pi though. Some seemingly odd hoops you have to jump through are a bit of a barrier to getting started, but will pay off when it's in production. I tried to do my Road Test as a summary and guide to getting started, as some people were struggling. That has some more info: AVNET Azure Sphere MT3620 Starter Kit - Review

dixonselvan · Answer

What's buzzing in Element14 Community and Hackster.io actually is Azure Sphere MT3620 Starter Kit. So, let's build it word by word and see what they refer to,

Azure - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/

This is a cloud computing service by Microsoft. To keep things simple, think it like accessing and using your computer without it physically present where you are.

What is the use? You can do awesome stuff like have your own website without the hardware(server) required but you need to pay for what you use as a service (the hardware - server) provided from Microsoft.
How do they manage to do this? They have many datacenters around the world where actual computers are, from where you are getting these services (and not actually from the cloud as the name suggests).

Microsoft Azure (formerly Windows Azure /ˈæʒər/) is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.

Azure Sphere- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/azure-sphere/

We saw Azure before this, so one among the cool things provided by Microsoft Azure is Azure Sphere. Let's see what the Microsoft Azure Sphere home page has to say about it - "Comprehensive IoT security solution—including hardware, OS and cloud components—to help you innovate with confidence". So let's break it down further,

Cloud Components - All the services provided by Azure related to this mainly, for now, the security service - AS3 - Azure Sphere Security Service.
OS - So we need something for the computer (CPU/ MCU/ MPU) to say, hey you actually don't have this resource here physically so you need to look up in the cloud (Azure). The set of programs - Operating Systems - that let the hardware know what it has to do.
Hardware - Now we are where we need to be. This is the actual device we have in our hands (Azure Sphere MT3620 Starter Kit). They have OS + firmware (user programs) in them which instructs what cool thing has to be done. In addition to this in our case, this hardware is capable of contacting the cloud (a computer somewhere in the world) to know what more needs to be done.

Azure Sphere is a Linux-based operating system created by Microsoft for Internet of Things applications.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8] It is the first time Microsoft has publicly released an operating system running the Linux kernel^[9] and the second Unix-like operating system that the company has developed for external (public) users – the other being Xenix. The name is derived from Microsoft Azure services.
The first supported processor is the ARM based MediaTek MT3620.^[10]

MT3620 - https://www.mediatek.com/products/azureSphere/mt3620

This is the first processor that can support Azure Sphere, from MediaTek. NXP is following this - https://media.nxp.com/news-releases/news-release-details/nxp-and-microsoft-bring-microsoft-azure-sphere-security

Azure Sphere MT3620 Starter Kit - Azure Sphere Starter Kit

This is the development kit built around MediaTek's MT3620 chip so this can support Azure Sphere!

References (everything inside quotes and the screengrabs):

What is Azure Sphere?

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