Azure Stack Architecture

Azure Stack is upcoming on-premises software that offers the functionality of the Microsoft-hosted Azure platform (public Azure). Stack’s architecture is very similar to public Azure and shares a substantial portion of its code according to Microsoft.

A fabric layer at Stack’s lowest level coordinates the activities of a pool of hardware, including servers, disk, and network components. The middle layer is composed of Resource Manager and pluggable Resource Providers, which define functionality of Azure compute, network, and storage resources. Resource Manager exposes APIs to access installed Resource Providers (making it extensible by Microsoft, customers, and third parties) and provides common functionality for them, such as a deployment mechanism and auditing capabilities. Management user interfaces at the top level are provided by a Web-based management portal, which is driven by pluggable extensions for each resource type. Resources can also be managed using PowerShell and the Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI) tool (not shown).