Microsoft pushes machine learning to the edge

Microsoft's new Azure edge computing offerings are helping customers extend the reach of its cloud-based machine learning services, according to Clayton Fernandez, the company's global director, Internet of Things. In June this year, Azure IoT Edge hit general availability, offering customers of Microsoft's cloud service new capabilities including support for the Moby container management system at the edge, the Azure IoT Edge security manager, an Automatic Device Management (ADM) service, and a range of tools for developers. Coinciding with the announcement that it had been GAed, Microsoft open sourced the IoT Edge code and posted it on GitHub. "We started with putting a PC on everyone's desk," Fernandez told Computerworld. "Next came everyone having smartphones in their pockets -- but now things are going to start getting really interesting with this whole universe of interconnected devices that are coming together in the intelligent cloud. "Today we're accepting billions of signals securely; we ingest, we reason, we take action – we call it the intelligent edge because these devices are becoming so capable that they're helping power some of the most advanced algorithms.