Customers who are taking a hybrid cloud approach are seeing real business value – I see this in organizations across the globe. The ability for customers to embrace both public cloud and local datacenter, plus edge capability, is enabling customers to improve their IT agility and maximize efficiency. The benefit of a hybrid approach is also what continues to bring customers to Azure, the one cloud that has been uniquely built for hybrid. We haven’t slowed our investment in enabling a hybrid strategy, particularly as this evolves into the new application pattern of using intelligent cloud and intelligent edge.
…Hybrid strategy with new Microsoft innovation is enabled for Microsoft Customer’s.
Before I dive into what’s new, I want to take a moment to share why Microsoft is so passionate about enabling a hybrid approach. It stems from a deep understanding of our customers and their businesses over the past several decades. We want every organization on the planet to benefit from cloud innovation. Fundamentally, hybrid enables every organization to participate in this technology transformation. Beyond this, we see the leading experiences enabled by tapping into both the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, creating optimized experiences for literally every use case.
Hybrid cloud is evolving from being only the integration of a datacenter with the public cloud, to becoming units of computing available at the edge, including even the world’s most remote destinations, working in concert with public cloud. You can read more about this new era we call intelligent cloud and intelligent edge in an earlier blog. What’s compelling about the intelligent edge is many of the same patterns and principles for hybrid applications apply to edge applications.
That means investments our customers make today in a hybrid cloud, and the skillsets developed from running these hybrid applications, position them to take advantage of edge computing and tools that can yield even bigger benefits in the future. Toward the goal of helping customers tap into this potential, I am very excited to announce some new edge capabilities. Azure Data Box Edge is now available. Today is the general availability of Azure Data Box Edge. We previewed the Data Box Edge appliance with edge compute and network data transfer capabilities last September. Data Box Edge provides a cloud managed compute platform for containers at the edge, enabling customers to process data at the edge and accelerate machine learning workloads, powered by Azure Machine Learning and Intel Arria 10 FPGA. Data Box Edge also enables customers to transfer data over the internet to Azure in real-time for deeper analytics or model retraining at cloud scale or for long term storage, as does the Azure Data Box Gateway virtual appliance that is also available today. You can read more about both and how customers like Cree and Esri are already using Data Box Edge via Dean Paron’s blog.
