Microsoft brings your network to Azure in an effort to reduce latency and support distributed applications that work across infrastructure on-premises, in edge data centers, and in Azure.

The scale of the public cloud and services such as Azure is astounding. Massive data centers full of compute and storage are available on demand, and the network pipes in and out of those sites give you tremendous bandwidth. But putting all your compute eggs in one cloud basket has its downsides, with network latency a significant issue.

It’s not surprising to see Azure doing more with the edge. I’ve recently looked at how Microsoft is moving compute closer to end users, but compute is only part of the story. If we’re to get Microsoft’s promised consistent experience wherever we access Azure services, we need to be able to treat our edge resources and our Azure-hosted compute and storage as part of a single virtual network, with policy-driven security and routing.

#azure #hybrid cloud #cloud computing