Microsoft brings more AI smarts to the edge

At its Build developer conference this week, Microsoft is putting a lot of emphasis on artificial intelligence and edge computing. To a large degree, that means bringing many of the existing Azure services to machines that sit at the edge, no matter whether that's a large industrial machine in a warehouse or a remote oil-drilling platform. The service that brings all of this together is Azure IoT Edge, which is getting quite a few updates today. IoT Edge is a collection of tools that brings AI, Azure services and custom apps to IoT devices. As Microsoft announced today, Azure IoT Edge, which sits on top of Microsoft's IoT Hub service, is now getting support for Microsoft's Cognitive Services APIs, for example, as well as support for Event Grid and Kubernetes containers.