Microsoft is working steadily to enable more Azure services to run on other clouds, on the premises and now, on Kubernetes. On the first day of the virtual Build 2021 developer conference, Microsoft added more “Arc-enabled” Azure services to its list. It is also adding some new additional capabilities to its new branded “Azure Artificial Intelligence Services”.
Microsoft got rid of it I visit Ark, Its own Azure central management level, in 2019. Azure Arc allows users to centrally manage everything from inventory and governance to server configuration and organization, regardless of where these server workloads are located. Azure Arc enables users to view their on-premises and cloud resources – virtual or physical servers and Kubernetes clusters – in Azure Resource Manager in order to manage resources as if they were running in Azure, using a single pane.
Starting this week, Arc has enabled (in preview form) more Microsoft cloud services including Azure App Service, functionality, logic apps, API management, and event network. This means it can run on Kubernetes, as well as on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments using Azure. Officials said any Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) compliant Kubernetes group connected via Azure Arc could become a target for deploying these Azure application services.
Microsoft also announced at Build that it is gathering a number of its Azure AI Services and is renaming them as “Azure Applied AI Services”. Microsoft combines its Azure Bot service, Azure Metrics Consultant, Azure Video Analyzer, Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Form Recognizer, and Azure Immersive Reader and designates them as Azure Applied AI Services.
Azure Applied AI Services is for clients who want to use it as a base to create AI solutions for their business. It’s built on Azure Cognitive Services, a set of Microsoft AI models and tools that can do things like extract meaning from text, incorporate speech into apps and services, and analyze content within images and videos.
Microsoft is trying to make AI easier to use by giving customers a set of commonly used business processes that they can customize, rather than having to repeatedly create these types of foundational services themselves. Many Azure Applied AI services rely on tools developed by Microsoft for their own internal use. The officials cited an Azure Metrics consultant, who evolved from the work the Bing team did to discover deviations from normal operations, as an example. This work spawned the Azure Cognitive Anomaly Detection Service.
In addition, Microsoft is adding new features to Azure Communications Services (ACS). ACS aims to give customers and partners access to the same audio, video, chat, and text messaging services that Microsoft uses to run Teams. ACS gets a user interface library (now available in preview), call recording (next month in preview), direct routing (next month in preview), episodic using relays around NAT, or TURN, protocol support (now available in preview), and UWP Windows Communication Software Development Kit.
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