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Azure IoT Edge: Microsoft’s 60k LOC open source Rust code base

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Re: Azure IoT Edge: Microsoft’s 60k LOC open source Rust code base

#41

Post by atonse »

darzu wrote: post #39
walterbell wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure Sphere looks promising but the Microsoft $85 Linux dev board SDK requires a Windows 10 device with Visual Studio for development. Hopefully this is not another "Apple does it, so we can too" posture. If Sphere succeeds, many people will be happy to buy a network router that comes with 10 years of Microsoft Linux security updates. MS demo of BASIC on the Sphere cpu in an Altair: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP…

Azure Sphere dev here. Like any early project, we had to make many strategic choices on where to invest limited development time in. There are an endless number of features and platforms we'd love to support, but Visual Studio is an obvious first environment to target. I can't give you a timeline, but we're definitely investing in cross-platform tools. I must admit I'm disappointed Seeed set such a high price for the…

Thanks for the response. This makes more sense now. I’m very excited about your project because the #1 reason I am apprehensive of IoT for my clients is because of its dismal security. It’s also the reason I only use HomeKit for my House.

Keep it up! This level of multi level security is much needed.

I hope a whole ecosystem springs around it given it’ll be built on a solid foundation.

As a software person, this gives me more options even though it’s hardware.

Re: Azure IoT Edge: Microsoft’s 60k LOC open source Rust code base

#42

Post by cbolton »

pjmlp wrote: post #29
mtgx wrote: post #27

Kudos to Microsoft for using Rust. It's a shame Google is attempting to write a new operating system (Fuchsia) almost from scratch right now, but is completely missing the opportunity to use Rust so it doesn't have to deal with decades of memory corruption bugs and other security-related bugs in the future.

At least some system parts are written in Go, like TCP/IP stack, file system mounting utilities and a few other drivers. Also thankfully they are at least making use of modern C++ instead of C. While not as safe as Rust, definitely better than plain C.

Indeed, and several components are actually written in Rust, including the "recovery netstack" (whatever that is): https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/c/garnet/+/165955

Re: Azure IoT Edge: Microsoft’s 60k LOC open source Rust code base

#43

Post by veyalla »

atinchandel wrote: post #38
anonymousDan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you have poor/intermittent backend connectivity, low latency requirements, or are handling sensitive data and don't want to ship it to a cloud backend? I think there can be a place for this model. Perhaps something like GDPR can make it more attractive? In the projects you have worked on, was the primary motivation maintainability or a business need to gather all data centrally in order to perform some kind o…

Dan I agree there is place for this model especially when you want to make local decisions or produce lot of data (e.g. video). In most of the projects we handled data required central aggregation.

Using IoT Edge as a gateway is a popular and supported scenario: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-edge/iot-edge-as-...

Re: Azure IoT Edge: Microsoft’s 60k LOC open source Rust code base

#44

Post by darzu »

atonse wrote: post #41
darzu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure Sphere dev here. Like any early project, we had to make many strategic choices on where to invest limited development time in. There are an endless number of features and platforms we'd love to support, but Visual Studio is an obvious first environment to target. I can't give you a timeline, but we're definitely investing in cross-platform tools. I must admit I'm disappointed Seeed set such a high price for the…

Thanks for the response. This makes more sense now. I’m very excited about your project because the #1 reason I am apprehensive of IoT for my clients is because of its dismal security. It’s also the reason I only use HomeKit for my House. Keep it up! This level of multi level security is much needed. I hope a whole ecosystem springs around it given it’ll be built on a solid foundation. As a software person, this give…

Out of curiosity, what are the features of HomeKit that give you confidence in its security? I ask so I can have another data point in my mind.

It's definitely our goal to have a large ecosystem, of both hardware and software.

Re: Azure IoT Edge: Microsoft’s 60k LOC open source Rust code base

#45

Post by atonse »

darzu wrote: post #44
atonse wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the response. This makes more sense now. I’m very excited about your project because the #1 reason I am apprehensive of IoT for my clients is because of its dismal security. It’s also the reason I only use HomeKit for my House. Keep it up! This level of multi level security is much needed. I hope a whole ecosystem springs around it given it’ll be built on a solid foundation. As a software person, this give…

Out of curiosity, what are the features of HomeKit that give you confidence in its security? I ask so I can have another data point in my mind. It's definitely our goal to have a large ecosystem, of both hardware and software.

From day one, HomeKit had hardware PKI (and strong crypto with a hardware security module on all their devices). All their authentication and messaging was fully end-to-end encrypted, but again, all _in hardware_. [1]

But the beauty of it was, you never felt that complexity in software as a customer. It's the proverbial Apple product. The tradeoff is, because you need this special hardware HomeKit chip, the ecosystem is pretty dull, or too expensive. And that's held back HomeKit adoption.

After playing chicken with the industry for years, Apple finally gave in and is allowing software HomeKit devices to get certified now. That actually does away with some of the security IMO. But that's ok, it bothers me slightly less to have HomeKit software based lights. Whereas, I wouldn't compromise on that when it comes to security (like locks on my doors, or the garage door).

Hope that helps.

While I've had aspirations to get more into home automation from the business side, most of my experience is as a consumer, so weigh my input that way. :-)

[1] HomeKit Accessory Protocol: https://developer.apple.com/support/homekit-accessory-protoc...

[2] NodeJS Implementation of it to emulate things: https://github.com/KhaosT/HAP-NodeJS

Re: Azure IoT Edge: Microsoft’s 60k LOC open source Rust code base

#46

Post by dang »

dingo_bat wrote: post #11

Lot of Microsoft astroturfing going on here at HN nowadays. Every day there are 2-3 positive stories about Microsoft. Or maybe they have just become a great corporate citizen suddenly? It's less likely though.

This comment breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to insinuate astroturfing without evidence.

When we find actual astroturfing we crack down on it, but it's not ok to poison the threads by putting that label on views you happen to disagree with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Azure IoT Edge: Microsoft’s 60k LOC open source Rust code base

#47

Post by anonymousDan »

pletnes wrote: post #31
atinchandel wrote: post #17

With my experience of working on +300 IoT projects - In majority IoT application edge computing is not required, devices generate very less data and perform simple computing or no computimg at all.In embedded usually it's better to keep things simple so that cost and bugs can be reduced. Most IoT application or solutions are usually not adopted due to hardware cost (capex) so keeping devices processing, memory and de…

I work on an image/video analysis type project. Internet connectivity is over (sometimes flaky) LTE. We could not live with a «thin device» unless we had a fiber link to the cloud. Even if you do simple point measurements (e.g a weather station with temperature, pressure etc) it might make QA sense to perform multiple measurements and reject outliers, take an average etc before reporting to The Cloud.

Is your project/business public? If so any chance you could provide a link? I'm interested in this space from a research angle and it would be great to be able to point to a real-world use case.
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