Introduction to Azure Digital Twins
Tags: azure, azureiot, digitaltwins, iot
Published: 2022-01-24 17:02:35

I was eager to know buzz word "Digital Twins" and it is a hot topic for the everybody. I hope all the companies are working for Digital Twins such as Microsoft, IBM, AWS, Alibaba Cloud, GCP and so on.

**What is Digital Twins?**

A digital twin is a virtual illustration that is the real-time digital counterpart of a physical object or process.

## Digital Twin = Digital Replica of Real-world things, Places, Business Process, People


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/xgz4xgfbjzzemotc3wiu.png)

It has announced on Microsoft Build 2020 event that, Azure Digital Twins features, the IoT Platform that permits the creation of next generation IoT Connected Solutions that approach to the real world. I think it will be IoT Solution for all the business challenges, evolve the industries or companies to shaping the businesses.

**What is about an Azure Digital Twins?**

Azure Digital Twins is an Internet of Things (IoT) platform that permits you to form a digital illustration of real-world things, places, business processes and other people. You can gain insights that assist, you drive good product, optimize operations and cost, and make breakthrough customer experiences. you can currently do therefore across environments of every kind, as well as buildings, factories, farms, energy networks, railways, stadiums and even entire cities.

**What are the features available in Azure Digital Twins?**

- Open Modeling Language
- Live Execution Environment
- Input from IoT and business systems
- Output to Azure Time Series Insights, Storage and analytics

**Open Modeling Language**

The Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL) is a language for describing models and interfaces for IoT digital twins. Digital twins area unit models of entities within the physical setting like shipping containers, rooms, works floors, or logical entities that participate in IoT solutions. mistreatment DTDL to explain a digital twin's capabilities allows the IoT platform and IoT solutions to leverage the linguistics of the entity.

It is using the rich and flexible Digital Twins Definition Language based on the JSON-LD standard, you can configure your Azure Digital Twins services to tailor to the specific needs of your use case.

DTDL is also used for models all round other Azure IoT services, including IoT Plug and Play and Azure Time Series Insights.

**Live Execution Environment**

Azure Digital Twins permits you to bring your digital twins to life exploitation data from IoT and different data sources, making an always-up-to-date digital illustration of your setting that's ascendible and secure.

You can build the dynamic business logic and data processing as data flows through the execution environment, and now you can do the power of external compute resource such as Azure Function.

**Input from IoT and business systems**

You can very easily connect assets such as IoT and IoT Edge devices, as well as existing systems such as ERP & CRM to Azure Digital Twins to drive the execution environment.

You can now use or existing Azure IoT Hub to connect, monitor, manage all your assets at scale, taking advantage of the devices management capabilities that IoT hub provider.

you can use the Digital Twins Rest APIs that, you can also use other than IoT, unlocking even more actionable insight with Azure Digital Twins.

**Output to Azure Time Series Insights, Storage and analytics**

You can integrated Azure Digital Twins with other Azure services to build complete end to end solutions. You can find the other azure services as following

- Event Hubs
- Event Grid
- Service Bus
- Azure Date lake
- Azure Synapse Analytics
- Logic App
- Power BI
- Azure Time Series

**Azure Digital Twins pricing**

You can see the Azure Digital Twins services pricing

- No upfront cost
- No termination fee
- Pay for only what you need

you can find the Azure Digital Twins pricing based on the Region wise as following screens


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/tyg919chf3qjmrq7gnng.png)

you can calculate the Azure product and services based on your requirements to the following URL

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/calculator/


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/xvcc8wp6116wyk69pmic.png)

I have covered all the required things. If you find anything missing, please let me know. Please share your valuable comments or feedback to improve my future articles. Happy coding and happy learning.

Finally, if you feel free to contact me if you want any guidance and support to be needed. you can reach me at:

- Twitter: @msanthakumara
- Facebook: santhakumarm.munuswamy

**Reference**

- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/digital-twins/#documentation
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/blog/azure-digital-twins-powering-the-next-generation-of-iot-connected-solutions/
- https://github.com/Azure/opendigitaltwins-dtdl