Microsoft Brings Azure Service into Cloud Services

The IoT hinges on the cloud and the operations that go on at the edge. That’s where the data lives between collection and action, and now Microsoft’s powerful Azure platform is moving in, too.

Developers are constantly working to build better and more scalable cloud services that can help grow the IoT in the most reliable possible way. Now, the new Azure Service Fabric will help. It provides a platform to help developers and ISVs build scalable, custom cloud services for use with IoT-enabled devices.

It’s the culmination of five years of development at Microsoft and the company says it is the foundational technology upon which it runs the Azure core infrastructure. It also powers Skype for Business, InTune, Event Hubs, DocumentDB, Azure SQL Database and Bing Cortana, and now it’s available for all developers as part of the Azure suite.

The platform is built to understand infrastructure resources and needs of applications so it can automatically update and repair itself, making it durable and robust. A few features: it has an architectural approach where complex applications are composed of small, independently versioned services to power the most complex, low-latency, data-intensive scenarios and scale them into the cloud; it orchestrates and automates micro services; it solves hard distributed systems problems so developers don’t have to re-architect applications for broader use; it includes Visual Studio tooling and command line support.

The initial release will be for Windows, but a Linux release is expected. Microsoft will help with migration for customers already using Azure Cloud Services who want to add Azure Service Fabric.

Azure is quickly becoming the only player in the enterprise solutions for IoT game. Microsoft is playing its game, and if this keeps going, so will everyone else.