Google is getting out of the IoT services business. Microsoft is doing the opposite.

Google will shut down its IoT Core service. The company announced last week. The reason stated: Partners can better manage customers’ IoT services and devices. (For the idea that IoT workloads are key to growing the cloud business…)

While Microsoft is relying heavily on partners for its IoT and edge computing strategies, it is also building stable IoT services and integrating them with Azure. CEO Satya Nadella called the “intelligent cloud/intelligent edge” Peak turning into an intelligent end-to-end distributed-computing game.

Following a move in April that brought the Azure IoT engineering and PM teams into the Azure Edge + Platform team, Microsoft is working to consolidate its IoT and edge computing teams and combine those offerings with Azure. Microsoft officials said at the time that they wanted to integrate IoT / Edge with the company’s Azure Arc hybrid-management service; Azure Stack, its family of appliances and highly converged infrastructure (HCI) products; and Azure Edge Zones, a 5G-connected cloud service available at the edge facility. By doing this, Microsoft can manage edge devices around the world from Azure.

Among Microsoft’s current IoT offerings are: Azure IoT Hub, a service for connecting, monitoring and managing IoT assets; Azure Digital Twins, which uses “spatial intelligence” to map physical environments; Azure IoT Edge brings analytics to edge computing devices; Azure IoT Central; Windows for IoT, which enables users to build edge solutions using Microsoft tools. On the IoT OS front, Microsoft has Azure RTOS, a real-time IoT platform, Azure Sphere, a Linux-based microcontroller operating system platform and services, Windows 11 IoT Enterprise and Windows 10 IoT Core — which Microsoft still supports, but significantly less since 2018. The updated IoT OS platform.

(I’m not anywhere near as aware of AWS in the space, but a quick search shows it has it A complete set of IoT services For industrial, commercial and automotive. It also offers FreeRTOS, its IoT Greengrass open-source edge runtime and developer kit for education-oriented IoT devices. According to Microsoft, AI/ML seems to be a key workload here. (Unlike Microsoft, AWS also has a high home/consumer IoT presence.)

I’ve been asking Microsoft for an update on the company’s IoT and edge computing plans since April of this year, and I’ve been told repeatedly that it’s not a good time for a summary.

However, at the company’s Building Developers Conference in May, Microsoft officials presented a few sessions about the company’s dynamic IoT and edge strategies.

A few recipes:

• Like many cloud companies, Microsoft aspires to build edge and cloud software and services as one continuous computing fabric.
• Microsoft is looking to support the entire commercial IoT gamut, from the “small edge” (ie microcontrollers/sensors/fixed purpose devices); to the “light edge” Windows IoT Enterprise, Windows Server IoT and industrial devices, robots and kiosks; To the “hard edge” means hybrid servers, hyper-converged infrastructure (Azure HCI) and Azure Stack.
• More and more IoT solutions are starting to look like small datacenters, and the boundaries between devices, servers and virtual machines are blurring.
• In addition to better Azure integration, Microsoft is also looking to bring cross-service and device security to its IoT offerings (which I think includes Azure Active Directory integration and other things).
• Cloud native programming models and Kubernetes/container orchestration are key to IoT and edge strategies.

Microsoft toyed with the “hybrid loop” idea heavily in this year’s build. The concept: Hybrid applications can dynamically allocate resources across PCs and the cloud. The cloud becomes an additional computing resource for these kinds of applications, and applications — especially AI/ML-enabled ones — can choose to run locally on edge devices or in the cloud (or both). This concept is definitely being integrated deeply with Azure on IoT and edge devices and services.

I think we’ll hear more about Microsoft’s updated IoT and edge computing vision at the upcoming Ignite 2022 IT Pro conference in mid-October.