Azure IoT Central architecture - how are Digital Twins implemented and managed?

Question

I have a system with IoT Hub to ingests events from devices and Device Provisioning Service to provision devices. IoT Hub C# SDKs are used for the management of device tags and desired properties (IoT Hub device twins), and to invoke direct methods or schedule jobs.

Recently I've been experimenting with Azure IoT Central. While I don't plan to use it, I've found Digital Twins (that are being used on Azure IoT Central) to offer a very good way of managing IoT devices and I would like to emulate the same kind of functionality and capabilities on my IoT system.

The high-level architecture of IoT Central does not seem to indicate the services or logic used to manage Digital Twins.

As far as I understand, there are two ways you can start using Digital Twins:

• Plug and Play Digital Twins
• Azure Digital Twins service

Question - is Azure IoT Central purely based on Plug and Play Digital Twins and/or does it also use Azure Digital Twins service?

Answer 1

Yes, IOT Central is purely based on plug and play Digital Twins

plug and play Digital Twins enables solution builders to integrate IoT devices with their solutions without any manual configuration.

Azure Digital Twins can be used to design a digital twin architecture that represents actual IoT devices in a wider cloud solution, and which connects to IoT Hub device twins to send and receive live data.

Reference link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-develop/overview-iot-plug-and-play https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/digital-twins/overview#:~:text=What%20is%20Azure%20Digital%20Twins%3F%201%20Azure%20Digital,solution.%203%20Service%20limits.%20...%204%20Terminology .

Answer 2

IoT Central and Azure Digital Twin (ADT) are different, one is an aPaaS or application platform service while other is PaaS offering. IoT Central does not use ADT but the service can be integrated via the extensibility features of IoT Central, similar to PowerBI or custom web pages.

What is common to both is the use of open standard device modeling language called DTDL ( https://github.com/Azure/opendigitaltwins-dtdl/blob/master/DTDL/v2/dtdlv2.md ). It is based on Json-ld format and can be used in any IoT solution, not just Azure. This is what allows IoT Central application to understand device capabilities and automatically render related charts and control options (PnP)

ADT on other hand allows modeling and creating instances of large physical environments including but not limited to IoT devices and their relationships. The relationships between entities allows rich contextualization which is not possible with device centric view in IoT.