During the Day 2 Build 2016 keynote address, Microsoft made a number of announcements surrounding its Azure cloud computing division. Microsoft showed how Azure is being used in gaming, such as the mobile game The Walking Dead: No Man's Land and the web browser space-based MMO Age of Ascent.
Developed by Llyriad Games, Age of Ascent is currently in development for a launch in 2016, but it has already been holding monthly public tests prior to its launch. The game is designed to run on web browsers on PCs, tablets and even smartphones, and thanks to Microsoft's Azure services, Age of Ascent will be able to access hundreds of cloud-based servers to handle as many as 50,000 concurrent users in one game.
The Walking Dead: No Man's Land, released in 2015 for iOS and Android, is an action game based on the AMC zombie TV series. Developer Next Games adds new content to No Man's Land 24 hours after the release of a new episode of The Walking Dead and the team uses Azure services for those updates, along with other features.
Microsoft made some other Azure-based announcements during the keynote:
- It launched a preview version of Azure Functions, which offers a "serverless compute" service for Internet of Thing (IoT) devices.
- A preview of the Azure IoT Gateway SDK tools was released to developers, along with the Azure IoT Hub Device Management preview and Azure IoT Starter Kits
- Power BI Embedded, a service that runs on Azure, has launched, allowing developers to embed Power BI-based analytical reports on any device.
