On 22 January 2016 Microsoft released Technical Preview 1 of Microsoft Azure Stack. Microsoft Azure Stack is a new hybrid cloud platform product that enables organisations to deliver Azure services from their own datacenter to help customers achieve more.

Run Azure services in your Datacenter

Natalia Mackevicius begins the session by asking for a show of hands of those who have heard of Azure Stack.

Surprisingly, almost everyone has.

Microsoft wants customers to be at the centre of application innovation. Business are using shadow IT even more, CIOs are looking at more agile alternatives and more money is being invested in apps that IT in general.

Cloud is the new way to think about the datacentre. The traditional model relied on:

• Dedicated infrastructure for each application
• Purpose-built hardware
• Distinct infrastructure and operations teams
• Customised processes and configurations

Whereas the cloud model:

• Loosely coupled apps
• Industry-standard hardware
• Service-focus DevOps
• Standardised processes and configurations

However people and processes have to change. At the infrastructure level there will still be administrators – both infrastructure and services administrators. At the customer level there will be end users, developers and operations teams.

Introducing Microsoft Azure Stack

It consists of:

• Cloud-oriented application platform
• Cloud-consistent service delivery
• Cloud-inspired hybrid infrastructure

What does it look like?

• End-user experience
• Unified application model
• Infrastructure services & platform services
• Cloud infrastructure

Microsoft’s hybrid cloud platform consists of the Azure Portal, the Azure Resource Manager, Azure Iaas & PaaS and the Cloud Infrastructure. The benefits of the Azure Stack is that you have access to all the same tools, but in-house. Customers will have the ability to deploy services to both the private or public cloud.

Data sovereignty is a great example of the benefits to this model. Customers may want to utilise the public cloud to develop and test, but due to data sovereignty regulations may be restricted from running production workloads this way. In this scenario, the workload can be brought onto the Azure Stack on-premise.

Azure has a broad ecosystem… encompassing Linux, DSC extensions, resource groups etc. Each service can be run on either stack.

Cloud-consistent Service Delivery

This consists of:

• Agility – simplified experience, support traditional and cloud native apps, easier acquisition of IT resources
• Control – unified configuration, reduced developer chaos, integrated IT processes
• Flexibility – Azure-consistent APIs, extensible framework for resources

Azure Stack should not be confused with the Azure Pack, which is an in-house portal for services provided by the Windows Server System and SCCM.

Azure Stack is currently in Technical Preview, and can be downloaded from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/azure-stack/.

Consistency Across Clouds

Azure Stack ensures a consistent experience for operations, deployments and automations. Visually, it looks identical to the Azure platform hosted by Microsoft.

At the top of the stack is the tenant experience. This enables uses to use the same tools (REST API, PowerShell etc) to manage their experience.

Natalia then gave a brief live demo on how Azure Stack operates.

Up next…

That’s me done for the day. I’ll be back tomorrow with “Manage and protect Identities with Microsoft Azure AD and Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics”.