19. Architecting intelligent solutions

Cloud technology has changed a lot of things, including the creation of intelligent applications in an agile, scalable, and pay-as-you-go way. Applications prior to the rise of cloud technology generally did not incorporate intelligence within themselves, primarily because:

• It was time-consuming and error-prone.
• It was difficult to write, test, and experiment with algorithms on an ongoing basis.
• There was a lack of sufficient data.
• It was immensely costly.

Over the last decade, two things have changed that have led to the creation of significantly more intelligent applications than in the past. These two things are the cost-effective, on-demand unlimited scalability of the cloud along with the availability of data in terms of volume, variety, and velocity.

In this chapter, we will look at architectures that can help build intelligent applications with Azure. Some of the topics covered in this chapter are:

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