Microsoft’s Azure IoT Hub, a cloud-based service for managing and communicating with Internet of Things devices, is set to become generally available later today.

The Azure IoT Hub is a central aspect of Azure’s IoT Suite of products that can be used to develop and run applications built for connected devices. Launched in preview last September, companies can use Azure IoT Hub to provision, manage and ingest data from millions of IoT devices, meaning they’re free to focus on the hardware and software, without having to worry about handling a fleet of devices themselves.

Essentially, Azure IoT Hub serves as a backend that tells embedded devices what to do. It also collects the data those embedded devices collect, in order to power applications linked to them. Azure IoT Hub also comes with the advantage of being able to integrate with Microsoft’s other cloud services, which means developers can easily access something like Azure Machine Learning to handle processing and other tasks.

Microsoft prices Azure IoT Hub on a per-message basis, and offers a free tier that lets users test the service with up to 500 devices, with a limit of 8,000 messages per day. After that, users can pay for more expensive plans that increase the cap on messages sent.

“IoT Hub is the bridge between customers’ devices and their solutions in the cloud, allowing them to store, analyze and act on that data in real time,” wrote Sam George, partner director for Azure IoT at Microsoft, in a blog post.

At the same time as the Azure IoT Hub announcement, Microsoft also said it’s partnering with Advantech, Dell, HPE and Libelium on its azure Certified for IoT program. Those manufacturer’s IoT devices are all certified as being able to easily integrate with Azure’s IoT products.

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