A customer of SFL required a rapid proof-of-concept development to support a pitch of a commercial multi-room environmental control system to management. We connected a local Zigbee thermostat and magnet/reed switch to a Zigbee controller, communicated up through Zigbee2MQTT and Eclipse Mosquitto to the Azure Cloud IoT service. How cool! I implemented the custom bits in Zigbee2MQTT (Javascript) for these specific Zigbee devices, and wrote communications to and from the Azure Cloud (Python). The client implemented my code in multiple locations and demonstrated bidirectional communications and control.
Your best buy for a nickel!