I’ve been making some changes to the ConnectTheDots code for Gadgeteer devices and now I’m just doing some testing.
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How to spot an engineer.
They use “your” for everything…
Does that really say “Fork me on github” in the upper right corner?
… because that would be an awesome T-shirt.
edit: Okay… so that’s an actual thing! Oh well… my shirt still looks nice.
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Duke,
Just curious - are you finding any advantages to the ConnectTheDots approach (AMQP) over Azure Mobile Services?
I’ve stopped running my ConnectTheDots Azure site, since it was more expensive ($22/month, even after turning off the Stream Analytics), and I couldn’t see any advantage to it. Azure Mobile Services works well with pretty much any .NetMF device.
I can see how a business with huge streams of data would benefit from the security and Stream Analytics, but I get the impression that ConnectTheDots isn’t intended for hobbyists on a budget.
Thanks,
Dan.
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@ Dan1 - Interesting question as I’ve used both
and MQTT here for example
ConnectTheDots is really fun with the Stream Analytics and using event hubs and such and I’m doing a user group presentation in May entitled ‘Creating Mobile Solutions with Microsoft Azure’, so I like them all, it really comes down to what tool fits the job the best.
Now as far as AMQP goes, queues in general have somewhat disappointed me lately in that they all seem to come up a tad short in managing traffic. You use a message queue so it manages delivery and reception of your messages/data and yet the most common problem is connection issues and none of these queues seem to manage that very well, which often makes me wonder why would I want to use them, if I have to handle the most common issues myself. To be fair if we could go back in time, we would fix a problem that was actually fixed a long time ago as an associate of mine from a preview career years ago Marcus Ranum talked about here
And of course the concept of how to tell if you have a network connection. I like MQTT because its simple and has a Heartbeat (that connection thing), where as AMQP likes to fall over and then call you to hand it a beer. AMQP also requires HTTPS so that reduces my mainboard choices. So which is my favorite, lets see what happens at Build as I suspect there will be ample good news and progress on multiple fronts.
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Duke,
Yes, it was from your Codeshare projects and YouTube video that I learned how to use Azure Remote Services. I couldn’t get a foothold on Azure until I saw your work. So, thanks for that!
I’m quite happy with Azure Remote Services. It seems to be hobbyist-friendly: low cost (no cost for most), reasonably stable, and not very complex. I’m not doing anything very ambitious, just logging and monitoring sensor data.
When I first came across ConnectTheDots, I thought it was an informal effort by Microsoft to make it easy for hobbyists to hook up their devices to Azure. It targets popular hobbyist platforms, including NetMF. The technology is more complicated than Remote Services, but they’ve made it plug-and-play by giving us code and good step-by-step instructions. The Pi, NetMF, and Galileo code have all worked stably for me.
My main concern is cost. Stream Analytics costs money, but you don’t have to use it. The Event Hubs cost real money: $22/month, unless I’m doing something dumb in my setup. What’s worse, I can’t just turn off the Event Hubs when I’m not using them - to avoid getting billing, I had to delete the Service Bus.
Has that been your experience too, or have you found a way to reconfigure things to run ConnectTheDots less expensively?
Thanks,
Dan.
[ol]Not sure whether it’s AMQP, or Azure that’s requiring HTTPS, but
Either way, that’s a feature, not a bug in my book.[/ol]
As far as I’m concerned, if you’re doing anything beyond fiddling with stuff for home projects, anything going outside the firewall should be encrypted using TLS. Inside the firewall, fine, use unencrypted connections.
So if you’re in a position where you’re going to be using Service Bus / Event Hubs, you should be prepared to invest in boards that can do TLS. My 2 cents. 
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@ Dan1 - Decided I better take a look at how much everything was costing in Azure today and I see that my Stream Analytics are eating up a couple of hundred hours a day, which is interesting to say the least given I’m only running a small nuclear power station through it so I submitted a support request to see if that is actually the usage or if this is one of those beta things. Now like most things in Azure I would expect the price to fall quickly and continuously, but I am curious as to how I racked up those hours.
Today Microsoft announced the General Availability of Azure Stream Analytics which is great.
Duke,
According to the Stream Analytics pricing information, the hours are actually a “Streaming Unit (Blended measure of CPU, memory, throughput)”. So, I guess more data means more hours. A couple of hundred bucks a day does seem ridiculous, though - it seems the ConnectTheDots design is not optimized for cost.
I’ve kind of given up on the ConnectTheDots model for now - for me (as a hobbyist), it isn’t worth the added cost and complexity over a Mobile Services model.
This week, after updating the Azure SDK, I ran into something new when making a change to the ConnectTheDots web site and publishing it to Azure: an App Service Plan. This is a mandatory field on the Publish dialog now. For the ConnectTheDots website, it didn’t like the default App Service Plan - I had to create a new one in the “Basic” tier. It warned me that this tier is projected to cost $50 a month, so that tore it for me.
On the bright side, the new App Service Plan seems to be intended to prevent users from running into unexpected charges, so at least it warns you up-front when you’re about to add new potentially costly features.
Dan.
AMQP, as implemented by RabbitMQ, doesn’t require HTTPS.