Microsoft announced Azure Digital Twins

Microsoft announced Azure Digital Twins in late September. Digital Twins is a new platform service for modeling physical environments as digital graphs. It lets you build representations of buildings, rooms, devices, sensors, and people, and reason about their relationships in real time.

In practice, Digital Twins is about context: you model how things relate, not just the devices themselves. A sensor can belong to a room, a room to a floor, and so on, forming a live graph of your environment.

At the core is an event-driven architecture built on Azure IoT Hub and time-series data. The service then lets you run queries and rules, for example:

SELECT Room FROM Building
WHERE Room.Temperature > 28

Features like these make it possible to build smart-building applications or operational dashboards without wiring the relationships manually in code.

Although the service is still new, it clearly shows Microsoft's direction: moving from connected devices (as in IoT) toward connected environments. This means integration with Azure IoT Central, Event Grid, and Power BI will become a set of basic features as the vision matures.