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Azure IoT Central architecture - how are Digital Twins implemented and managed?

I have a system with IoT Hub to ingests events from devices and Device Provisioning Service to provision devices. IoT Hub C# SDKs are used for the management of device tags and desired properties (IoT Hub device twins), and to invoke direct methods or schedule jobs.

Recently I've been experimenting with Azure IoT Central. While I don't plan to use it, I've found Digital Twins (that are being used on Azure IoT Central) to offer a very good way of managing IoT devices and I would like to emulate the same kind of functionality and capabilities on my IoT system.

The high-level architecture of IoT Central does not seem to indicate the services or logic used to manage Digital Twins.

IoT Central high level architecture.

As far as I understand, there are two ways you can start using Digital Twins:

  • Plug and Play Digital Twins
  • Azure Digital Twins service

Question - is Azure IoT Central purely based on Plug and Play Digital Twins and/or does it also use Azure Digital Twins service?

Solution

  • Yes, IOT Central is purely based on plug and play Digital Twins

    plug and play Digital Twins enables solution builders to integrate IoT devices with their solutions without any manual configuration.

    Azure Digital Twins can be used to design a digital twin architecture that represents actual IoT devices in a wider cloud solution, and which connects to IoT Hub device twins to send and receive live data.

    Reference link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-develop/overview-iot-plug-and-play https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/digital-twins/overview#:~:text=What%20is%20Azure%20Digital%20Twins%3F%201%20Azure%20Digital,solution.%203%20Service%20limits.%20...%204%20Terminology.