Azure Stack Redoubles On-Premises Cloud Offering

Azure Stack, announced in May 2015, will offer functionality of the Microsoft-hosted Azure platform (public Azure) for customer on-premises and third-party hosted deployments. The software could speed private cloud deployments, ease customer transitions from traditional on-premises software to cloud implementations, and allow customers who have not used public Azure due to compliance or regulatory reasons to deploy the technology. Stack will be more comprehensive than and share more code with public Azure compared to Azure Pack, an existing on-premises offering that provides Azure functionality. However, Stack is not yet available for evaluation, and it will likely require Windows Server 2016 when it arrives.

Same Model, Code as Public Azure

Stack will deliver a significant portion of the software that drives public Azure. Organizations and hosting providers will be able to 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 IT staff of these tasks.