A few takeaways:
Like many cloud companies, Microsoft is aiming to build edge and cloud software and services as if they were one continuous computing fabric. Microsoft is looking to support the whole commercial IoT gamut, from “tiny edge” (meaning microcontrollers/sensors/fixed purpose devices); to “light edge” Windows IoT Enterprise, Windows Server IoT and industrial equipment, robots and kiosks; to “heavy edge,” meaning hybrid servers, hyper-converged infrastructure (Azure HCI) and Azure Stack. More and more IoT solutions are starting to look like small datacenters, and the boundaries between devices, servers and virtual machines are blurring. In addition to better Azure integration, Microsoft is looking to bring cross-service and device security to its IoT offerings (which I’m assuming means Azure Active Directory integration, among other things).Cloud-native programming models and Kubernetes/container orchestration are key to its IoT and edge strategies.
Microsoft also played up heavily at Build this year the idea of a “hybrid loop.” The concept: Hybrid apps will be able to allocate resources locally on PCs and in the cloud dynamically. The cloud becomes an additional computing resource for these kinds of applications, and applications – especially AI/ML-enabled ones – can opt to do processing locally on an edge device or in the cloud (or both). This concept definitely relies on IoT and edge devices and services becoming more deeply integrated with Azure. I’m thinking we’ll hear more about Microsoft’s updated IoT and edge-computing vision at its upcoming Ignite 2022 IT pro conference in mid-October, if not before.
