Azure IoT Edge tool set stirs AI into Microsoft's cloud

AI and connected devices have coalesced as a central component of Microsoft's Azure cloud strategy, as the company seeks to marry the disparate technologies to complement and amplify each other. Microsoft plans to spend $5 billion over the next four years on IoT, and AI will play a big part in that push, judging by the myriad overlaps in new functionalities rolled out here at Microsoft's Build developer conference. The updates push more of Azure's capabilities to edge devices, as Microsoft attempts to weave a unified fabric of services that extend out from its public cloud. The open-sourced Azure IoT Edge runtime improves users' ability to modify and debug IoT applications. Microsoft's edge computing model is similar to that of AWS Greengrass, which Amazon has promoted as a way to add compute capabilities outside AWS facilities.