AT&T and Microsoft partnership on network edge compute highlights future of cloud and 5G
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AT&T and Microsoft partnership on network edge compute highlights future of cloud and 5G
Intelligent cloud, a connected edge, and a compute-enabled intelligent network?
It's hard enough keeping track and making sense of one technology megatrend at a time, but when you start trying to co-mingle two or even three of them together, well, generally speaking, all bets are off. Yet despite that seemingly unscalable challenge (and the buzzword bingo bonanza it implies), that's exactly what the latest extension to a relatively new partnership between AT&T and Microsoft is attempting to do. In particular, the two companies are working to tie together cloud computing, 5G, and edge computing into a meaningful way. Even more surprisingly, this combination actually makes a great deal of sense and provides a tantalizing glimpse into the future of where all three of these major trends are heading.
The two companies announced a new effort called Network Edge Compute (NEC) that would bring Microsoft's Azure Stack cloud computing platform to network infrastructure equipment sitting at the edge of AT&T's millimeter wave (mmWave)-based 5G network. The combination, which is currently available in the Dallas, TX region on a trial basis, will allow companies to start experimenting on new types of generation-defining applications that many believe are possible with the latest generation mobile network. It's a chance to figure out what kinds of applications can be the Uber/Lyft, AirBnB, or Netflix of 5G.
At this point, no one really knows for sure what those new types of applications might be -just as no one could predict the rise of Uber/Lyft, Airbnb, or Netflix when 4G first came on the scene. However, there's a general sense that something along th