Years in the making, a cloud + edge model for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management nears preview

Microsoft announced at Ignite 2020 this week that they will soon begin the preview of a hybrid architecture for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. The model will introduce new Cloud and Edge Scale Unit add-ins that give customers the option to distribute warehousing and manufacturing workloads across geographies and across on-premises and Azure computing infrastructure, the company says.

The preview begins in October, according a Microsoft blog post by Dynamics 365 general manager Manoj Swaminathan. When deployed with local data centers, the architecture will require the use of Azure stack devices, according to. He explained that the service will allow for modeling and planning to optimize results:

Customers can make data-driven decisions before making any investment by easily simulating various factors that impact resilience of their critical manufacturing and warehouse processes, such as network latency, traffic volume, time-outs, or intermittent connectivity. They can then deploy the scale units—edge or cloud—to best overcome these challenges.

And, he continued, the model promises "a plug-and-play experience and allows customers to easily scale during usage spikes to ensure high throughput." And the model will cover asset management as well as "other critical manufacturing and warehouse execution scenarios."