Microsoft SMA Azure AI Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML) provides tools and ML frameworks for developers to create their own machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) services. Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services are a set of prebuilt APIs, SDKs and customizable services for developers, including perceptual and cognitive intelligence covering speech recognition, speaker recognition, neural speech synthesis, face recognition, computer vision, OCR/form understanding, natural language processing, machine translation, and business decision services. Most AI features appeared in Microsoft’s own products and services (Bing, Office, Teams, Xbox, and Windows) are powered by Azure Cognitive Services. Azure Blockchain Workbench Through Azure Blockchain Workbench, Microsoft is providing the required infrastructure to set up a consortium network in multiple topologies using a variety of consensus mechanisms. Microsoft provides integration from these blockchain platforms to other Microsoft services to streamline the development of distributed applications. Microsoft supports many general-purpose blockchains including Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric and purpose-built blockchains like Corda. Functions Azure functions are used in serverless computing architectures where subscribers can execute code as an event driven Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) without managing the underlying server resources. Customers using Azure functions are billed based on per-second resource consumption and executions. Internet of Things (IoT) Azure IoT Hub lets you connect, monitor, and manage billions of IoT assets. On February 4, 2016, Microsoft announced the General Availability of the Azure IoT Hub service. Azure IoT Edge is a fully managed service built on IoT Hub that allows for cloud intelligence deployed locally on IoT edge devices. Azure IoT Central is a fully managed SaaS app that makes it easy to connect, monitor, and manage IoT assets at scale. On December 5, 2017, Microsoft announced the Public Preview of Azure IoT Central; its Azure IoT SaaS service. On October 4, 2017, Microsoft began shipping GA versions of the official Microsoft Azure IoT Developer Kit (DevKit) board; manufactured by MXChip. On April 16, 2018, Microsoft announced the launch of the Azure Sphere, an end-to-end IoT product that focuses on microcontroller-based devices and uses Linux. On June 27, 2018, Microsoft launched Azure IoT Edge, used to run Azure services and artificial intelligence on IoT devices. On November 20, 2018, Microsoft launched the Open Enclave SDK for cross-platform systems such as ARM TrustZone and Intel SGX. Azure Orbital Launched in September 2020, Azure Orbital is a ground station service to help customers move satellite data to the cloud and to provide