Azure Digital Twins: Powering the next generation of IoT connected solutions

Last month at Microsoft Build 2020, we announced the new features for Azure Digital Twins , the IoT platform that enables the creation of next-generation IoT connected solutions that model the real world. Today, we are announcing that these updated capabilities are now available in preview. Using the power of IoT, businesses have gained unprecedented insights into their assets. But as connected solutions continue to evolve, companies are looking for ways to create richer models of entire business environments, which is quite challenging even for sophisticated businesses.

Our goal with Azure Digital Twins is to make the creation of sophisticated digital twin solutions easy. With today’s announcement, you can apply your domain expertise on top of Azure Digital Twins to design and build comprehensive digital models of entire environments.

Using Azure Digital Twins, you can gain insights that drive better products, optimization of operations, cost reduction, and breakthrough customer experiences. And you can now do so across environments of all types, including buildings, factories, farms, energy networks, railways, stadiums—even entire cities.

What’s new?

We received a lot of valuable feedback from the Azure Digital Twins preview and we are excited to share the expanded capabilities of Azure Digital Twins that will simplify and accelerate your creation of IoT connected solutions.

Open modeling language

The new preview of Azure Digital Twins lets you create custom models of any connected environment. Using the rich and flexible Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL) , based on the JSON-LD standard, you can configure your Azure Digital Twins service to tailor to the specific needs of your use case.

Real-world environments are created from connected twins. Each twin is modeled using properties, telemetry events, components, and relationships that define how twins can be connected into rich knowledge graphs. DTDL is also used for models throughout other Azure IoT services, including IoT Plug and Play and Azure Time Series Insights.

DTDL is the glue that helps you keep your Azure Digital Twins solution connected and compatible with other parts of the Azure ecosystem.

As part of our commitment to openness and interoperability, we will continue to promote best practices and shared digital twin models for a wide range of businesses and industry domains through the Digital Twins Consortium and other channels to accelerate your time building valuable IoT connected solutions that span many industry verticals and use cases.

Live execution environment

Azure Digital Twins lets you bring your digital twins to life using data from IoT and other data sources, creating an always-up-to-date digital representation of your environment that is scalable and secure.

Using a robust event system, you can build dynamic...