Azure Stack On-Premises Offering in Second Preview

Azure Stack offers 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 compliance or regulatory reasons to deploy the technology. A second preview of Stack was published in Sept. 2016, and the software is expected to become generally available in mid-2017. Stack shares more code with Azure compared to Azure Pack, an existing on-premises Azure offering. However, it will ship exclusively on hardware appliances from Dell, HPE, and Lenovo, which could limit its deployment flexibility.

Same Model, Code as Azure

Stack delivers a significant portion of the software that drives Azure. Organizations and hosting providers can use it 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 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, relieving the private cloud provider’s IT staff of these tasks.