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At Build conference, Microsoft debuts ‘planet-scale’ database, AI training service
Underscoring a big bet by Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Satya Nadella (pictured), cloud computing is dominating the agenda on the first day of the company’s Build 2017 conference.
The technology giant today introduced a host of new services for its Azure infrastructure as a service platform that were headlined by Cosmos DB, a managed database designed to support “planet-scale applications.” In more practical terms, Microsoft claims that the system can carry out hundreds of trillions of operations per day against numerous different data types.
The latter feature is facilitated by a schema-agnostic architecture that can store records without requiring them to be structured in any particular format. Microsoft presumably hopes that Cosmos will make Azure more attractive to web companies, which are emerging as a major source of revenue for infrastructure-as-a-service providers. Snap Inc. alone has signed $3 billion worth of cloud deals with rivals Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud Platform.
Organizations with more ordinary requirements can turn to the two other database offerings that Microsoft unveiled this morning. Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL are implementations of their namesake relational stores. Amazon.com Inc. provides its own managed of the systems, as does Google Inc., which means that they’ll now have to look elsewhere for a competitive edge.
Microsoft is doing the same. One of the main focus areas in the company’s quest for new revenue opportunities is artificial intelligence, which also starred on the conference agenda. The company unveiled the new database offerings alongside a service called Azure Batch AI Training that is designed to ease artificial intelligence projects.
More specifically, it aims to streamline the automated learning sessions that machine learning algorithms go through during development to increase their accuracy. Microsoft said that the service will provide the ability to train models using a variety of hardware including field-programmable gate arrays, a type of chip that can be optimized for a specific task down to the firmware level.
Microsoft is currently live streaming the keynotes and announcements from Build 2017 on its Channel 9 page.
Image: Microsoft
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