On October 28, we announced our plans to make Azure Sphere Generally Available in February of 2020. General availability (GA) will mark our readiness to fulfill our security promise at scale, and to put the power of Microsoft’s expertise to work for our customers every day—by delivering over a decade of ongoing security improvements and OS updates directly to each device.
In preparation for GA, we are making a number of enhancements to our OS and SDK to further strengthen the security of devices at customer sites and ensure supportability from GA onward. Although our goal is to avoid the introduction of breaking changes and incompatibility between releases, in a few situations, action may be required to ensure that your devices and applications continue to work as intended beyond our upcoming February release.
Beta API promotions
In our February release we plan to promote the following APIs from Beta to long-term stable (LTS). For more information on Beta APIs, see Application runtime version, sysroots, and Beta APIs.
|
Header file |
API changes from Beta to LTS |
|
eventloop.h |
EventLoop_RegisterIo parameter type change; function signature unchanged, so existing code should continue to run |
|
networking.h |
No changes; all promoted |
|
rtc.h |
No changes; all promoted |
|
storage.h |
No changes; all promoted |
|
sysevent.h |
SysEvent_RegisterForEventNotifications parameter type change; function signature unchanged, so existing code should continue to run |
|
stdlib.h |
getenv, setenv, unsetenv promoted |
|
mman.h |
memfd_create promoted |
|
tlsutils/deviceauth_curl.h |
DeviceAuth_SslCtxFunc promoted; DeviceAuth_CurlSslFunc deprecated |
Migration to new cloud management model
As part of GA readiness, the Azure Sphere Security Service will no longer support the old cloud management model starting the week of December 16, 2019. Instead, you’ll need to use the new cloud management model, which was introduced with the 19.10 SDK. If you have already upgraded to the 19.10 or later SDK, this will not affect you. If you are still using the 19.09 SDK, you need to upgrade; see About Migration for details. This change will not involve a new Azure Sphere OS or SDK release.
Default device groups and OS feeds
The new cloud management model includes five default device groups: Development, Field Test, Production, Field Test OS Evaluation, and Production OS Evaluation. Because of a bug in default device group creation, some Development device groups receive the Retail Evaluation OS feed instead of the Retail OS feed. Before we release the Retail Evaluation OS, make sure your Development device groups receive the correct OS feed.
Follow these steps to check the OS Feed Type for your Development device group:
1. List all products in your tenant:
azsphere product list
2. For each product, look at the details of the Development device group:
azsphere device-group show --productname <product> --devicegroupname "Development”
3. If the OS Feed Type is RetailEval, change it to Retail:
azsphere device-group update --productname <product> --devicegroupname "Development" --osfeed "Retail"
Verify your apps with the Retail Evaluation OS feed
When the GA release of the OS is ready, we will make it available on the Retail Evaluation OS feed at least 14 calendar days before it is released to the Retail OS feed. Please plan to verify your scenarios against the OS. Be aware that you might need to modify your procedures or applications. We will provide additional information about upcoming changes through the IoT blog and in the Azure Sphere online documentation as GA nears and we develop detailed guidance.
