April 26, 2024
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The Hannover Messe 2024 represents a major event in the global industrial sector and serves as the world’s largest industrial trade fair. Microsoft’s participation, specifically the Azure Stack team, highlights their contributions to integrated manufacturing solutions through the Microsoft Cloud. These solutions facilitate secure connections between personnel, resources and operational processes, increasing organizational resilience.

The Hannover Messe 2024 represents a major event in the global industrial sector and serves as the world’s largest industrial trade fair. Microsoft’s participation, specifically the Azure Stack team, highlights their contributions to integrated manufacturing solutions through the Microsoft Cloud. These solutions facilitate secure connections between personnel, resources and operational processes, increasing organizational resilience.

A demonstration of a robotic assembly line that assembles battery components is prominently displayed on the Microsoft booth. This setup includes standard operational technology (OT) assets from Rockwell Automation, exemplifying the integration of adaptive cloud strategies and open standards such as OPC UA to accelerate industrial digital transformation. Azure IoT Operations and Azure Arc seamlessly transfer data from the production line to Microsoft Fabric, supporting cloud-based real-time monitoring and analytics.

Adopting advanced OT technologies such as Azure IoT Operations, built on Kubernetes, poses significant challenges in computing infrastructure, especially at the edge. Critical requirements for these infrastructures include ease of deployment, manageability at scale, and providing essential capabilities such as managed Kubernetes and high-performance resiliency, all within the constraints of an industrial environment.

To meet these needs, Microsoft is pioneering the extension of Azure edge infrastructure to more compact devices such as edge or industrial PCs. Demonstrated at Hannover Messe using Lenovo ThinkEdge SE30s, these devices provide a robust, cost-effective solution with optimal performance for specific applications, powered by Intel Core i5 vPro processors and 16 GiB of memory.

This innovative infrastructure approach combines traditional Azure Stack HCI elements with new methodologies. The host operating system is Azure Linux, with Azure Kubernetes Service transforming these devices into a Kubernetes cluster running directly on the hardware, without virtualization. This infrastructure is fully managed and operated via the Azure cloud.

Furthermore, the adaptive cloud strategy is a unified control plane for comprehensive application and infrastructure management. A demonstration at the event will show the use of Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and Azure Portal in managing this new edge infrastructure. This system allows configurations to be standardized and deployed as infrastructure-as-code, integrates seamlessly with Azure management services such as Azure Monitor, and enables direct interaction with Kubernetes resources.

For now, this new edge infrastructure solution is a technology demonstration. Previews start later this year. If you’re interested, sign up now to be among the first to get early access.

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