Microsoft’s Azure Stack, a cloud platform which enables organisations to deliver Azure services from within their own data center, will enter technical preview this week.
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It’s Not Windows Azure Pack Microsoft has a Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server 2012, but it’s not the same thing as Azure Stack. Resources get pooled into one big pile that applications can draw on as needed.
Datum Datacentres today announced the launch of Datum Cloud Connect to provide direct connectivity from its Farnborough data centre to major public clouds such as AWS Direct Connect and Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute. The same Azure portal is used to manage resources, and the same PowerShell scripts can be used both locally and for Microsoft’s cloud. 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.
But from the standpoint of someone using Visual Studio to deploy software, an on-premise Azure Stack deployment presents exactly the same profile as the public Azure deployment. Azure is certainly growing – Microsoft reported a 135 percent revenue increase on a constant currency basis in the third quarter of 2015 – but Microsoft is nevertheless playing catch-up, specifically with AWS.
As it continues to roll out new services for Azure Stack, Microsoft said users will also be able to take advantage of the hundreds of Azure applications and components now available through the GitHub repository. “As far as tenants go, it really should appear as if it’s another region of Azure for them”, he said.
What is Azure Stack? And, as on Azure, you can choose to run applications on Linux with Azure Stack – thanks to contributions from Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. The model is based on a hybrid approach through which consumers can host cloud computing services over private data centers.
The platform will enable end users to access Azure’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) capabilities using on-premise datacentre kit. In addition, Microsoft plans to release operating system images and Azure Resource Manager templates.
Microsoft is to build its Azure Stack by increments on a foundation of consistency and continuity, it has pledged.
Both Azure and Azure Stack share a lot of their underlying technologies and Microsoft has standardized on a single architecture for both.
Microsoft says that cloud should be viewed as a model, not as a physical place.
“From a management API and app model perspective, it is a proper subset of the broad services available in Azure”, said Al Hilwa, research director at International Data Corp. It all comes down to what Microsoft hears from its customers about what they’d like to see first in Azure Stack.
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“We have rich experiences and learnings building and operating hyper-scale datacenters”, Neil said in a blog post.
