Microsoft’s Azure Edge Zones Ready for Edge Computing, 5G
… place workloads automatically.
“What you have in the first version is you say, ‘Drop this container in this location.’ In the future, you will see software from us that will do more sophisticated placement of code, and we will work with the carriers to integrate more of their APIs. The carriers have location information and they have latency information, [quality of service]. Ultimately, 5G slicing (using a dedicated portion of network for your traffic) will be integrated in the platform.”
Taking the Azure Experience to the Edge
Not all Azure services will be available in Azure Edge Zones, Khalidi cautioned.
“We have hundreds of services that only belong in the big regions,” he said. “This runs basic containers and basic VMs and basic networking.”
But for those services, the developer experience will be exactly like picking a normal Azure region to deploy a VM or container in the cloud portal.
“In the public cloud they see a pool of VMs, queues and containers, and ways to do life cycle management on containers, and to deploy them,” Khalidi said. “They’ll see the same thing on the edge, although not every possible VM SKU will be available at the edge. You can go to the Azure portal and say, ‘I want to be in this edge location. Drop it in L.A. or North Dakota, or Perth, Australia.’ And for a given carrier, you’ll see it’s in city X by carrier Y. All the IP edge software we have, all the ML, AI, the analytics, all the container-based software, just runs as-is in those places.”
“Anybody can build cheap metal boxes and drop them somewhere and call them an edge, but unless you bring the ecosystem with you, unless you bring the developers with you, unless you bring the applications with you, it’s just another x86 box,” he said.
Microsoft talks about using Edge Zones for the usual advanced low-latency scenarios like mobile gaming (Game Cloud Network has a 5G game called Tap & Field live running on the AT&T and Azure Edge), drone monitoring, smart cities, and real-time analytics. Partners such as NetFoundry are focusing on the immediate industrial and retail opportunities like mobile point of sale, factories, and warehouses.
“Industry 4.0 type businesses will use Azure Edge Zones with private 5G and embedded NetFoundry networking to reliably deploy and manage global software-defined networks, reduce latency and improve security,” Sreelakshmi Sarva, head of products at NetFoundry, said in a statement.
“We also see greenfield interest from sectors like manufacturing, warehouse automation and connected supply chains because previous options did not meet their requirements for local connectivity and edge processing,” Sarva said.
Private Edge
Azure Private Edge Zones work very differently. They use Microsoft’s existing Azure Stack Edge hardware, which is available in …