The world continues push Internet of Things (IoT) towards the future, and Microsoft wants to contribute. As Microsoft Build 2018 kicks off with its first day, the company introduces various offerings for its Azure IoT Edge cloud service.
Among Microsoft’s announcements include the open sourcing of its Azure IoT Edge Runtime. Azure IoT Edge provides tools which can help developers add AI, Azure services, and custom apps to their IoT devices. The IoT Edge runtime manages the inner workings of each device. In this sense, open source allows customers to modify and debug their devices more easily.
Additionally, Microsoft adds support for Cognitive Services to Azure IoT Edge. The service begins with limited tricks, however, as it only supports Custom Vision service. With Custom Vision, however, developers can use drones and industrial equipment to perform vision-related activities without internet connectivity. The company assures that plenty of additional Cognitive Services will arrive in the next few months.
As for AI, the company also announces Project Brainwave, a deep neural network acceleration platform. Though only in preview on Azure, the significance of this platform is the addition of real-time AI to the edge.
Elsewhere, Microsoft announces a partnership with Qualcomm to create an AI developer kit which runs Azure IoT Edge. The kit gives developers the tools to build camera-based IoT products using Qualcomm Vision Intelligence Platform and Qualcomm AI Engine.
Azure IoT Edge also further features and improvements outside from machine learning. Azure Event Grid comes to the platform, helping developers to connect events across multiple services to and from various sources. The platform also gets support for hardware-accelerated Machine Learning model evaluation through any computers with DirectX 12 GPUs.
Overall, Microsoft is making its Azure IoT Edge cloud more convenient for developers, which in turn improves the efficiency at which they can deliver goods and services to customers. With the recent popularity of smart cities and service improvement via data collection, it makes sense that Microsoft would work to make this market more accessible.
(Source: Tech Crunch)
