Microsoft Adds More AI, IoT, And Blockchain Services To Azure

Microsoft announced several new Azure cloud services spanning artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, and blockchain ahead of its annual Build developers’ conference next week.

“With Azure, we are delivering the best cloud for AI, ML (machine learning), and computing at the edge,” said Frank Shaw, corporate vice president of communications for Microsoft, on a call with reporters. This, of course, is also how Microsoft’s competitors Amazon and Google are positioning their clouds to encourage developers to build on top of their respective platforms using their cloud services.

Microsoft introduced a new set of Azure AI technology, which includes a new Azure Cognitive Services category called “Decision,” which gives users a specific recommendation for more informed decision making. This category “includes those services that not just observe the world – image recognition for example – but build in a sophisticated decision process,” Shaw said.

The Decision category includes Content Moderator, the recently announced Anomaly Detector, and a new service called Personalizer, which uses reinforcement learning to provide users with a specific recommendation.

Microsoft is also upping its AI game on Azure Search with the now-available cognitive search capability. This allows customers to apply Cognitive Services algorithms to extract insights from structured and unstructured content. The company is also previewing a new capability that enables developers to store AI insights gained from cognitive search.

It also wants to make it easier to build, train, and deploy ML models. To that end, Microsoft added new MLOps capabilities within Azure DevOps integration to support ML reproducibility, auditability, and automation. Additionally, a visual ML interface provides no-code model creation and deployment with drag-and-drop capabilities.

Microsoft also announced the availability of hardware-accelerated models that run on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), as well as ONNX Runtime support for NVIDIA TensorRT and Intel nGraph for high-speed inferencing on NVIDIA and Intel chipsets.

Edge and IoT

In terms of new edge computing capabilities, Microsoft introduced Azure SQL Database Edge, which is a SQL engine optimized for lower compute requirements with built-in AI. The product combines data streaming with in-database ML and graph capabilities. And because Azure SQL Database Edge shares the same programming surface area with Azure SQL Database and SQL Server, developers can take applications to the edge with consistent programming experience and without having to learn new tools and languages.

Microsoft also announced IoT Plug and Play, a new open modeling language to connect IoT devices to the cloud and deploy IoT solutions at scale. Previously, software had to be written specifically for the connected device it supported, limiting the scale of IoT deployments. With this launch, IoT Plug and Play provides customers with a large ecosystem of partner-certified devices.

Blockchain

And finally, Microsoft announced a managed blockchain service built on its Azure Blockchain Workbench, which launched last year. The new Azure Blockchain Service deploys a fully managed consortium network and offers built-in governance for common management tasks, such as adding new members, setting permissions, and authenticating user applications.

Microsoft also said this week that J.P. Morgan’s Ethereum platform, dubbed Quorum, is the first ledger available in Azure Blockchain Service. This gives Microsoft and J.P. Morgan customers the ability to deploy and manage scalable blockchain networks in the cloud.―SDX Central