Azure IoT Central will be retired in March, despite Microsoft still sending invite notifications

Microsoft will reportedly retire the Azure IoT Central platform on March 31th, according to a statement released to users on the Azure console, says The Register, that reads:

Starting on April 1, 2024, you won’t be able to create new application resources; however, all existing IoT Central applications will continue to function and be managed. Subscription is not allowed to create new applications. Please create a support ticket to request an exception.

Azure Platform

Despite being unable to create new application resources, the platform will not be effectively retired immediately. Instead, Microsoft says that the retirement will be complete in 3 years, March 31, 2027. Developers will have enough time to migrate to alternatives and seek solutions.

After that date, Azure IoT Central will no longer be available.

However, despite the reporting of the retirement, Microsoft hasn’t released anything official about it: no public announcement, no official statement either, and, the Redmond-based tech giant is still sending invite notifications to customers.

On top of that, the Azure IoT Central official website is still up, as of today, February 16, and it doesn’t mention anything about retirement.

Start your Azure IoT journey with Azure IoT Central. Azure IoT Central is a ready-made UX and API surface for connecting and managing devices at scale, delivering reliable data for business insights. It preassembles platform as a service (PaaS) offerings, bringing together each service beneath it for an easy-to-configure, comprehensive, and secure IoT offering.

Microsoft

We wonder how this will impact the 1 billion Azure users everywhere, and millions of developers globally, or if Microsoft will come up with a solution for it. Either way, Azure generated about $75.3 billion in revenue in 2022, alone, so the decision to retire one of its key platforms is indeed a strange business move.

We’ll most likely hear from Microsoft soon.