Within the Azure IoT platform, Microsoft is eliminating Azure IoT Central. From April 1, 2024, you will no longer be able to start new projects. The service will be completely discontinued from March 31, 2027.

Out of nowhere, Microsoft decided to eliminate a component within the Azure IoT stack. According to The Register, the message is currently being pushed into the affected users’ Azure console.

The service will be completely deleted on March 31, 2027. Starting April 1, 2024, you will no longer be able to allocate resources for new applications. All existing IoT Central applications continue to work. You can open a ticket with the help desk requesting to add a new project after this date as an exception. It remains to be seen whether this exception will be answered positively.

Today, Azure IoT consists of three pillars:

• Azure IoT Hub: Cloud service that allows you to connect, manage, and monitor IoT services and sensors in a secure and scalable way.
• Azure IoT Edge: Enables devices to run cloud-based workloads locally.
• Azure IoT Central: a fully managed IoT solution in the cloud for connecting and managing devices at scale.

Central is one level above Hub. The hub remains available (for now). The registry reports that the Azure console does not yet display any warnings related to Hub. Microsoft has not yet made any statement as to why the service appears and whether the other components will disappear in the long term or not.

Microsoft isn’t the first major company to cancel an IoT service. IBM suddenly shut down its Watson IoT service at the end of 2022, giving customers just a year to transfer everything. Today the service is no longer active.