Microsoft announced in a blog post the release of its first technical preview of Azure Stack. The release will take place live on Friday, January 29. The event will be followed on February 3 by webcast where Mark Russinovich CTO, Microsoft Azure) and Jeffrey Snover (Chief Architect, Enterprise Cloud) will answer questions, discuss and demonstrate the Azure Stack.
The whole point of the Azure Stack is to make the whole cloud experience and transition more useful, through the incorporation of services such as Virtual Machines, Virtual Network, and blob/table storage—for applications like SQL Server or SharePoint.
How to deal with cloud fever
Mike Neil – Corporate Vice President, Enterprise Cloud, Microsoft Corporation, makes an excellent observation at the very beginning of his blog entry: “Organizations are rapidly turning to the cloud to increase business agility and drive faster innovation. At Microsoft we’ve seen this first-hand rapid adoption of Microsoft Azure, where we’re seeing nearly 100,000 new subscriptions every month. However, we know many enterprises still have business concerns around moving fully to the public cloud, such as data sovereignty or regulatory considerations. This leaves them in a complicated position, with one foot in the public cloud and one on-premises.”
Businesses of all shapes and sizes are having a cloud fever at the moment, but with so many things to take into consideration, the whole process can become quite confusing. Therefore, Microsoft’s advice for enterprises is to approach cloud as a model – not a place. “This model cuts across infrastructure, applications and people, and requires a hybrid cloud approach that provides consistency across private, hosted, and public clouds,” writes Neil. “To translate this model into reality, customers need a consistent cloud platform that spans hybrid environments. Only Microsoft is able to deliver on this need in a manner where the platform is proven in hyper-scale public cloud and extended to private and hosted clouds.”
You might think that this sounds like advertising, and to be fair, it sort of does. But the truth is that Microsoft has been keeping an advantage (in front of Amazon Web Services or Google for example) in on-premise data centers for quite some time now.
The importance of a consistent hybrid cloud platform
With Azure Stack, Microsoft is bringing proven innovation – including IaaS and higher level PaaS services – from hyper-scale datacenters to on-premises, enterprise-scale environments to meet customers’ business requirements.
Mike Neil explains in his blog post: Why does a consistent hybrid cloud platform really matter? Because it provides customers access to the rich Azure ecosystem, empowering developers, IT and organizations to do more:
- Application developers can maximize their productivity using a ‘write once, deploy to Azure or Azure Stack’ approach. Using APIs that are identical to Microsoft Azure, they can create applications based on open source or .NET technology that can easily run on-premises or in the public cloud. They can also leverage the rich Azure ecosystem to jumpstart their Azure Stack development efforts.
- IT professionals can transform on-premises datacenter resources into Azure IaaS/PaaS services while maintaining oversight using the same management and automation tools that Microsoft uses to operate Azure. This approach to cloud enables IT professionals to have a valuable seat at the table – they are empowered to deliver services to the business quickly, while continuing to steward corporate governance needs.
- Organizations can embrace hybrid cloud computing on their terms by helping them address business and technical considerations like regulation, data sovereignty, customization and latency. Azure Stack enables that by giving businesses the freedom to decide where applications and workloads reside without being constrained by technology.
How does Azure Stack deliver this consistency across the public cloud and your datacenter? Just like Azure, Azure Stack is a comprehensive platform for hosting modern business applications. Azure and Azure Stack have a standardized architecture, including the same portal, a unified application model, and common DevOps tools. The application model is based on Azure Resource Manager, which enables developers to take the same declarative approach to applications, regardless of whether they run on Azure or Azure Stack. Tooling-wise, developers can use Visual Studio, PowerShell, as well as other open-source DevOps tools thereby enabling the same end user experiences as in Azure.
“Through a series of Technical Previews, Microsoft will add services and content such as OS images and Azure Resource Manager templates to help customers start taking advantage of Azure Stack,” mentioned Neil. “Also, Azure has 100s of such applications and components on GitHub and as the corresponding services come to Azure Stack, users can take advantage of those as well.”
Though there have been a few hiccups along the way – mostly tech related, we have to take notice of Microsoft’s whole enterprise approach. The company has proven that it’s more than able to deliver services and devices that fit the current business needs, maybe even set the directions for future enterprise tech trends.
Tune in for the Azure Stack preview this Friday.
Find out more about Azure Stack at the webcast on February 3.
