A true Hybrid Cloud becomes a reality, thanks to Microsoft Azure
Microsoft’s long awaited Private Cloud software is finally out, and its called Azure Stack. HPE, Lenovo and Dell are the launch hardware partners that are taking orders at the time of writing this post, with expected delivery date in September.
What is Azure Stack?
In a nutshell, Azure Stack is a trimmed down version of Azure. To be precise, Azure Stack is a packaged version of trimmed down Azure that customers can setup in their datacenter. The Azure Stack environment is always kept in sync with Azure to ensure security and features are up to date. With Azure Stack you will get a state of the art cloud environment that runs on a special hardware that is exclusively designed for this software to work efficiently.
How is it different from setting up my own VM environment?
Do not mistake Azure Stack to a yet another managed Hypervisor environment. Azure Stack is fundamentally different from your traditional VM environment. Azure Stack allows you to run both IaaS and PaaS (Azure App Services that includes Web apps and Functions, Azure SQL, Storage, Containers, Orchestration etc) workloads with the same efficiency and simplicity as you can on Azure. In addition to this you also get SDK for application development, CLI tools for automation and monitoring and regular software updates from Microsoft to keep it in sync with Azure releases. Using Azure Stack, IT departments can manage all their (on-prem and cloud) IT assets in a single interface at ease.
Who should care about this?
This new product is a game changer for Microsoft Azure. In my opinion, this alone leapfrogs all other cloud vendors in terms of capabilities and enterprise fitness including AWS which is substantially larger than Azure in terms of estimated revenue and footprint in the public cloud space.
If you are an IT leader, decision maker, influencer, Architect or a Developer you must pay very close attention to this recent development and invest some time and energy learning what this actually means to you, your role and to your organization.
What Problems does this really solve?
If you have ever been involved in a cloud transformation project in any capacity either as an IT Leader, Developer, Architect, System Engineer or an IT Worker you probably went through a very rough phase of sifting through confusing yet not so convincing architecture design options.
Questions like,
- What parts of my application/infrastructure should I move to the Cloud?
- Should I move to IaaS or PaaS?
- What about the regulatory requirements?
- Is my data secure?
- What is the TCO? And how do I even calculate it?
- How does it affect the teams and individual positions in my company?
- What new technologies would my team have to learn?
- What about my DevOps process?
…and probably many more. The whole process of just designing the architecture becomes very chaotic and challenging very soon, with differing opinions and ideologies along with fear of unknowns.
If you are an ambitious Cloud Architect who wants to design a cutting edge, highly efficient cloud born application/environment, it simply is not possible to achieve the goal unless you start thinking Azure Stack as part of the design.
Take a look at the very simple architecture for a website that a company desires to migrate to the cloud. While the pieces that were able to be moved to the public cloud have been designed with latest cloud technologies, the parts that have to be kept on-premise are still living in server racks running Virtual Machines that you will still have to patch, update, reboot, backup, secure and run grueling maintenance jobs. Just see the diagram for yourself. Which side do you want to be? What do you want to write code on?

When you have Azure Stack, you don’t need to worry about having to deal with such situation. Your Cloud journey has suddenly become surprisingly smooth and very fascinating. You can design Cloud born applications that can be fully hosted on-prem on Azure Stack. Your new architecture could be like this…

Imagine the improvement in efficiency as a whole, including software quality, infrastructure maturity, developer satisfaction, financial frugality and so on. In addition to all this, you will not have to worry about compliance with regulatory requirements either, because Azure along with Azure Stack is the most certified Cloud environment in the industry today. That alone takes a lot of your manual, time consuming and costly efforts away from you.
Watch this excellent, informative keynote talk by Jeffrey Snover to learn much more about Azure Stack and its awesomeness !
