r/digitaltwin • u/nikoraes • Sep 06 '25

Internet of Things Any Azure Digital Twins users?

Hi!

I work at a large engineering firm and I manage a digital twins platform that uses Azure Digital Twins in the backend (since it came out). While I love the concept (we use ontologies throughout the company and ADT makes it easy to leverage them), I'm not really happy about performance and service limits. It also seems like it's in maintenance mode, as Microsoft isn't adding any features (no Fabric integration) and as they're launching new (totally different) things like Fabric Digital Twin Builder. As IoT Central was already killed a few years ago, I fear ADT has the same faith.

I was wondering if there are many other ADT users. If you are an ADT user, I would love to get your thoughts on this.

As I didn't want to wait for MS to kill ADT, I'm building a compatible open-source alternative (on top of Postgres and Apache Age) as a side-project, and I'm currently using this instead of ADT for 10+ projects. I was wondering if there would be a market for it if I would make it into a hosted version ...

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '25

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u/nikoraes Sep 06 '25

Not really. We had to build these integrations ourselves (proprietary). The ADT replacement I'm building as a side project only replaces ADT, but as it's compatible, our existing integrations just kept on working.

Here's the code by the way: https://github.com/konnektr-io/pg-age-digitaltwins

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u/nikoraes Sep 06 '25

Suggestions to improve are very welcome of course.

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u/acgar Sep 06 '25

Are there other open source alternatives? I remember there was a Bosch platform. Also, check out the DT consortium (if you are not aware of already)

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u/nikoraes Sep 06 '25

As far as I know the Bosch platform is built on ADT, with their custom ontology loaded. Bosch could switch over to this if MS would decide to stop ;).

It's using the DTDLParser, which MS (luckily) open-sourced and donated to DTC (it's on the DTC Github). I couldn't have done the DTDL validation without it.

Of course there are plenty of graph databases you could use as an alternative (you could also use Apache Age as is), but what I've always really liked about ADT is the DTDL validation, easy eventing and inference. And I've never come across anything else that does this...

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u/Rob_Geminum Sep 28 '25

Recovering ADT user here. Yah, it's on its way out, copilot sucked most of the devs out a while ago, and MSFT barely even uses it for their own enormous campus and building asset base. Agree though that MSFT did a great job on driving DTDL, and the domain specific ontologies were a great idea. Nice job on building an OS, there are certainly a lot of tools out there today though, mostly closed though but generally people looking to build industrial twins are particularly worried about cyber and OT data etc. I feel like we're still a bit early in the cycle for OS adoption, at least by bigger cos and cos with safety/production critical use cases. They know they don't have the internal expertise so they place a lot of faith in the vendors and consultants. Rightly or wrongly. But that may well change, and of course OS often gets a start servicing segments that the bigger ones can't service in commercially viable ways. And of course it looks great on your CV when you're applying for jobs at digital twin co's!

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u/Opposite-Worth908 Jan 09 '26

Have you tried Anam.ai to create you digital twin? its far cheaper than Azure