Build 2016: Microsoft unveils cloud and IoT innovations for developers

No business or industry today can afford to ignore the cloud. “As cloud speed, scale and agility continue to increase, so too does what’s possible using cloud services,” says Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise Group - Microsoft in a  blogpost. He cites an example of a dairy farmer who can improve his cow’s milk production by hooking them to monitoring sensors. Or a car that can alert about traffic and save you some time on the way to work. All this is actually happening today, with exponentially increasing amounts of data, new ways to analyse this data for better business insights and connect it to a growing number of devices. At the ongoing Build 2016, Microsoft says it aims to take the pressure off developers to innovate faster by building applications to process and analyse data at cloud speed, irrespective of device or platform. Microsoft claims to make things easier by making Xamarin available to every Visual Studio developer for free, including the free Visual Studio Community Edition. Announced at Build 2016 was a preview of Azure Functions, extending Azure’s application platform with a new serverless compute for event-driven solutions. Functions lets developers handle on-demand tasks that respond to events, common in Web and mobile applications, IoT and big data scenarios. Working across Azure and third-party services, it enables developers to write functions in a variety of languages, such as JavaScript, C#, Python and PHP, with the ability to automatically scale out to meet demand, only charging for the time a function runs. And with an open source runtime, developers will be able run Functions anywhere – on Azure, in their datacenters or on other clouds, says Microsoft. Microsoft also unveiled the Azure IoT Starter Kits that make it easier for developers to embrace Internet of Things (IoT). With development boards, actuators, sensors and tutorials, anyone with Windows or Linux experience – whether a student, inventor, device maker, hobbyist or developer – can quickly build IoT prototypes inexpensively, says the company. Once a prototype is ready for full-scale deployment, these users can leverage all of Azure’s IoT offerings already on the market. In addition, Microsoft announced the Azure IoT Gateway SDK, along with device management in Azure IoT Hub – further easing the path to IoT by connecting legacy devices and sensors to the Internet without having to replace existing infrastructure, and managing these devices at scale via a standards-based approach. Additionally, Microsoft announced he general availability of Azure Service Fabric, the microservices application platform, to help developers design apps and services with always-on availability and scale. This platform has been used for years as the foundation for Microsoft cloud services like Azure SQL Database, Azure Document DB, Cortana and Skype for Business, says Microsoft. Its features include automated health-based upgrades and rollbacks, support for stateful and stateless microservices, and deep Visual Studio integration. Microsoft also announced previews of Service Fabric for Windows Server, for deploying on-premises and on other clouds, and Service Fabric for Linux and Java APIs.