Stack Lets Customers Host Azure

Azure Stack is software that offers some functionality of the Microsoft-hosted Azure platform (Azure) for customer on-premises and third-party hosted deployments. Stack could speed private cloud deployments, enable hybrid scenarios, and allow customers who have not used Azure due to regulatory, security, or connectivity reasons to deploy the technology. Stack ships exclusively on hardware appliances from Microsoft partners, which could limit its deployment flexibility. It is offered through a subscription model that requires frequent updates, unlike traditional perpetually licensed on-premises software. Stack is generally available for proof-of-concept single-server deployments, and delivery of appliances began in Oct. 2017.

Azure Services Without Microsoft Data Centers

Stack delivers a significant portion of the software that drives Azure. Organizations and hosting providers can use Stack to reduce the burden of building a private cloud environment. A private cloud typically refers to an organizational data center implementation where hardware is virtualized rather than dedicated to running particular application instances. Hardware can be shared and quickly reprovisioned, often without manual intervention, to scale and provide failover capabilities for deployed applications. Self-service capability allows tenants of the cloud, such as an organization’s departmental users or a hosting provider’s customers, to select, provision, configure, and monitor the services they require, which speeds rollout of new services and relieves the private cloud provider’s IT staff of these tasks.