Microsoft has amped up support for Intelligent Edge, by making Azure IoT edge available on virtual machines. This, the company hopes will create an open and strong ecosystem.
And more importantly, provide users with more choices in deploying their edge solutions.
The company talked about support for VMs in a recent blog post that highlights how the Azure IoT Edge solution brings cloud intelligence to the edge, and allows users to act on the data that is gathered by these devices in real-time.
Redmond made this platform generally available last year in June, and has open-sourced the service on GitHub for developers to start working with it.
With this recent announcement, customers will have the ability to run Azure IoT Edge on a VM using a supported OS. And although the service will support most of the operating systems that can run containers, not all of them will be equally supported.
As Chipalo Street, Principal Program Manager of Azure IoT explains:
“While this works for multiple virtualization technologies, VMware has simplified the deployment process of Azure IoT Edge to VMs using VMware vSphere. Additionally, vSphere 6.7 and later provide passthrough support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM), allowing Azure IoT Edge to maintain its industry leading security framework by leveraging the hardware root of trust.”
In addition to this, the family of host OS should always match the family of the guest OS used inside the container of a module.
As in, users will be allowed to run Linux containers on Linux only, and Windows containers on Windows.
Regardless, this is a very welcome development for IoT on Azure. Azure IoT Edge will run on a whole range of hardware, including microcontroller units that run Azure Sphere, with cloud and edge experience power by Azure Stack.
Microsoft is on quest to design the solution to meet the demands of every customers in every scenario, and this gets the tech giant close to this goal.
