Azure IoT Hub Migration: Scalable Industrial IoT and Edge Alternatives
In the evolving landscape of industrial edge and IoT, developers are looking for stable, scalable, and efficient platforms to build their industrial edge systems. Azure IoT Hub has been a popular choice amongst developers. However, when you start using Azure IoT Hub for real-world operational scenarios, you might start to experience challenges. Can it deliver when several applications need to share common edge compute, if edge hosts require to be offline at times, or when requirements for application availability sharpen?
In this article, we guide you through how to address the limitations of Azure IoT Hub, overcome them, and migrate into a solution that allows you to benefit from all the features known from Azure IoT Hub, but offers a great user experience, offline capabilities, and is built according to edge-native, scalable design principles.
What is Azure IoT Hub? Architecture & Capabilities
Azure IoT Hub is Microsoft’s cloud-based platform that enables secure communication between IoT devices and the central cloud, addressing the need to build software-defined industrial IoT solutions. Many developers are used to it and appreciate its built-in features for deploying Edge IoT applications.
Key Capabilities of Azure IoT Hub:
- Easy Agent Installation: Deploy the Azure IoT Edge runtime quickly with low setup overhead.
- IoT Host Management: Connect, provision, and manage IoT devices from a centralized Azure dashboard.
- Edge Container Management: Run containerized applications directly on edge devices using Azure IoT Edge.
- Comprehensive APIs & SDKs: Access well-documented REST APIs and SDKs for edge and cloud workflows.
- Protocol Support: Built-in compatibility with MQTT, AMQP, HTTPS, and OPC UA enables device integration.
- Data Flow Management: Define and orchestrate edge data pipelines.
- Native Azure Integrations: Connect to other Azure services like Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure Monitor to extend the IoT solution building.
Azure IoT Hub is widely used for building industrial IoT solutions but face limitations when scaling workloads or managing complex edge environments.
Limitations of Azure IoT Hub in Complex Industrial Edge Environments
While being a widespread solution for managing edge workloads, Azure IoT has also faced some less positive feedback when it comes to more sophisticated edge architectures. Let’s look closer.
1. Connectivity Challenges & Lack of Edge Availability Features
An overarching characteristic of edge environments, is that edge sites will experience extended periods of disconnection. To address this, your application sets new and high requirements for on-site availability at the edge. Fact is, among our user base, offline capabilities have grown into a complete knock-out requirement.
A key challenge in industrial edge environments is maintaining application availability during connectivity loss. Edge sites often operate independently for extended periods, demanding robust offline capabilities. However, Azure IoT Hub lacks distributed high availability features like local clustering and secrets management. During restarts, applications must still connect to Azure cloud services to retrieve secrets—posing major risks in disconnected scenarios. This cloud-centric approach limits the platform’s suitability for resilient edge workloads.
2. Module and Application Structure Limitations
Azure IoT Hub enforces structural restrictions that hinder flexibility at the edge. Developers often manage distributed applications made up of multiple containers, each with its own lifecycle. IoT Hub imposes a cap of 50 modules per deployment and confines them to a single monolithic structure. This makes it difficult to manage loosely coupled microservices or scale across modular edge workloads.
3. Scalability Gaps in Advanced Edge Deployments
As industrial edge deployments become more sophisticated, they require support for complex infrastructure needs—like custom ingress networking, GPU acceleration, volume mounting, leaf devices, and deep multi-tenancy. Azure IoT Hub does not natively support these capabilities. Its design favors simple telemetry streaming to the cloud rather than running modern edge-native services and workloads.
Continue reading: The Edge Ecosystem
What is Azure IoT Operations?
Microsoft has introduced a relatively new offering called Azure IoT Operations. It’s a Kubernetes-based platform that brings Azure services closer to industrial environments by running on on-premise infrastructure. In practice, it targets small or mid-sized data-center setups on the shop floor rather than truly distributed industrial edge devices.
While it extends Azure’s hybrid capabilities, it’s still a fairly heavy solution in terms of footprint and operational requirements. It’s better suited for environments with substantial compute and stable connectivity, not for lightweight edge nodes that need to operate autonomously and offline.
Avassa: A Scalable Azure IoT Hub Alternative for Modern Edge Applications
The Avassa Edge Platform provides a seamless migration path from Azure IoT Hub, enabling you to retain your existing edge applications with minimal disruption. Avassa not only matches the core capabilities of Azure IoT Hub but also surpasses them by offering advanced features designed for scalable, resilient, and highly available industrial edge environments.
Like Azure IoT Hub, Avassa is built for lightweight IoT and far-edge deployments. It uses a single, self-managed agent at each edge location, eliminating the need for complex, centralized platforms or additional operational overhead. This design allows organizations to modernize their edge architecture without compromising on performance, security, or manageability.
Avassa vs. Azure IoT Hub: Feature Comparison Table
Avassa directly support all the features mentioned above:
| Azure IoT Hub Use Case | Avassa Edge Platform |
|---|---|
| Easy installation | The Avassa Agent, the Edge Enforcer, is a single small container and installed with an automated installer. From that moment on it’s self-updating. |
| Host management | The Edge Enforcer monitors the host’s health and enables required configurations and automated network setup. |
| Security purpose-built for Industrial Edge | We would argue that Avassa has an even stronger solution with an embedded distributed secrets manager, automatic setup of micro-segmented encrypted application networks, and remedial actions. |
| Container applications | Avassa is focused on deploying container applications at the edge. Avassa excels Azure IoT in many ways; you can have any number of applications with separate lifecycles, and richer application configurations for storage, networking, and more. |
| APIs | Avassa has a rich and well-documented API: see https://avassa-api.redoc.ly/. |
| Industry protocols | The market is changing with an open eco-system, there are lots of containerized alternatives available for industry protocols such as Mosqitto and HiveMQ Edge. |
| Data flows | Avassa has a built-in pub/sub bus which lets you define data flows at the edges. You can use Node-RED as an option. |
| Integration with Azure services ecosystem | Avassa offers Azure AD integration for single sign-on. The application lifecycle can easily be integrated with Azure CI/CD as well as GitHub. With Fluent Bit application logs and metrics can be forwarded into Azure analytics tools. |
With Avassa being as lightweight as Azure IoT Hub but richer in functionality, you will benefit in two key ways:
- It’ll be easy to migrate from Azure IoT Hub without establishing a more complex platform.
- The additional features in Avassa will let you expand, and excel your previous solution.
Key Benefits of the Avassa Edge Platform
But to bother to replace it, you must get something for the trouble. Once migrated, you will learn to appreciate the following characteristics and features that Azure IoT Hub lacks:
| Offline capabilities | Azure IoT Hub is dependent on the central Azure components. The Avassa Edge Platform was built for offline autonomous scenarios. |
| Applications first | With the Avassa Edge Platform, you will have a more efficient edge application platform which lets you focus more on the applications and less on the infrastructure. Out of the box you can remotely manage application requirements like GPUs, leaf devices, and application networking. The Avassa Edge Platform also provide application-centric monitoring and troubleshooting features that are lacking in Azure IoT Hub. And a fundamental piece, you can deploy as many separate applications as are needed. Azure IoT Hub forces you to bundle them into a single “module” |
| Flexible deployments | The Avassa Edge Platform separates applications and deployments into separate entities. With deployments, you can target a large set of edge sites with a specific version of an application. You can also perform canary and rolling upgrades to ensure the rollout meets operational requirements. |
| Monitoring and observability | Avassa has built-in monitoring capabilities ranging from host monitoring to application monitoring. This includes collecting metrics and context-aware state propagation. For example, how does the failure of a single container impact my application? You can also configure and distribute synthetic probes to the edges. |
| Cloud independence | With the Avassa telemetry solution, you can feed your data to any cloud including on-premises data analytics solutions for air-gapped environments. |
With the Avassa Edge Platform, you will also have a predictive cost model. No hidden cloud costs, and a clear pay-as-you-grow model. We also know that developing embedded systems is a technically challenging task, and our developer-focused support will make development cycles easier.
Key Considerations for Azure IoT Hub Migration
When approaching an Azure IoT Hub migration, particularly in scenarios involving edge workload migration and next-generation industrial edge platforms like Avassa, it’s vital to examine several core aspects of architecture and operations to ensure a smooth transition.
1. Application structure
Migrating from Azure IoT Hub to Avassa is straightforward, as both platforms support OCI-compliant container images. Unlike Azure IoT Hub, which imposes structural limitations on application packaging and deployment, Avassa provides greater flexibility. You can manage multiple discrete applications and deployments independently, enabling a more modular and maintainable architecture. This opens the door to refactoring your solution into smaller, decoupled services as part of the migration process.
2. Device Provisioning and Identity Mapping
Device provisioning and identity are foundational to IoT security and management. In Azure, this is handled through device twins,identities and client certificates. Avassa uses a similar mechanism with client certificates being optional. . A key difference between Azure IoT Hub and Avassa is Avassa’s support for edge clusters. With Avassa, applications can run as multiple replicas distributed across a cluster, enabling load balancing, high availability, and local failover at the edge. This means that as part of your migration, you gain the ability to provision and manage resilient, clustered edge environments, significantly enhancing application robustness compared to the more centralized, device-centric model of IoT Hub.
3. Secrets & Certificate Management in Disconnected Mode
Secrets management becomes particularly important in disconnected or intermittently connected edge scenarios. Unlike Azure’s centralized secrets management, Avassa enables site-local storage and handling of secrets through Strongbox. This ensures that secrets (like certificates or credentials) can be securely managed, rotated, and accessed locally even during network outages. Policies are enforced centrally, but secrets only flow outward, supporting a zero-trust architecture.
4. Edge application networks and Ingress/Egress Needs
Avassa offers robust, built-in networking capabilities at the edge—unlike Azure IoT Hub, which assumes network traffic is primarily routed to the cloud. With Avassa, you can define secure application networks and configure granular ingress and egress policies directly at the edge. This allows for local API exposure, enabling edge applications to communicate securely with nearby systems or devices without relying on round-trips to the cloud.
Configuration of DNS records and ingress IPs per service instance supports flexible and secure connectivity models at the edge.
5. Observability and Monitoring Requirements
Observability in distributed edge deployments—particularly across multiple industrial sites—can quickly become challenging. While Azure offers centralized metrics and logging, Avassa provides a distributed observability model designed specifically for the edge. Each edge site supports real-time, site-local monitoring, including synthetic application checks and local logging. These capabilities are aggregated in Avassa’s Control Tower, which offers centralized alerting, log search, and fleet-wide health insights. Additionally, Avassa exposes APIs for integration with external tools such as CloudWatch, making it easier to implement unified observability across hybrid environments during and after migration.
6. Compliance, Governance & Security
Security and compliance are often among the main drivers for moving away from cloud-dependent IoT solutions. Azure IoT Hub and IoT Operations both rely heavily on Azure’s central control plane, which can make it challenging to meet local data-sovereignty requirements or operate under regulations that restrict outbound connectivity.
Avassa takes a distributed approach to governance and security. Each edge site enforces centrally defined policies locally, ensuring consistent security behavior even when offline. Access control and authorization are handled through role-based access control (RBAC) with clear separation between application owners and site providers. Secrets and credentials are managed through a distributed secrets manager, ensuring sensitive data never needs to traverse the cloud.
This architecture supports compliance with data-protection and operational-continuity requirements by keeping critical data and control logic on-premise, while still offering centralized visibility and auditing through the Control Tower. The result is strong governance and policy consistency without sacrificing the autonomy needed at the industrial edge.
Final Thoughts: Build Scalable Industrial Edge Solutions Beyond Azure IoT
If Azure IoT Hub no longer meets the evolving demands of your industrial edge environments, Avassa provides a future-ready alternative. With its support for self-healing edge clusters, robust offline capabilities, and application-centric deployment model, Avassa empowers developers to build resilient, scalable edge systems without compromising on performance or manageability.
Whether you’re planning a migration from Azure IoT Hub or starting a new industrial IoT deployment, Avassa delivers the flexibility and modern architecture required to thrive at the edge. Its seamless cloud integrations, rich edge-native feature set, and lightweight agent design make it a compelling choice for next-generation edge workloads.
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