Microsoft has announced that Azure Stack will begin rolling out across the world this September. They made the announcement at the Microsoft Inspire 2017 conference held in Washington D.C. on July 10.
Azure Stack
Azure Stack lets developers build a private cloud version of Azure public cloud in their own data centers. It will allow companies to build and deploy applications using the same APIs, DevOps tools, and portal across their public Azure cloud and on-premises private cloud.
Customers can order the solution from Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo, with the first systems shipping in September, with other hardware partners including Cisco, joining in the future.
Features
Azure Stack allows developers to create and run applications on their own servers while making available cloud-based professional tools. It will help improve latency issues (as data is processed on-site) and help heavily regulated industries (such as banking or health care) meet requirements regarding uploading information to the cloud.
Azure Stack pricing is determined in two ways: pay as you use, and capacity based. Pay as you use is similar to the Azure service, while capacity based comprises a fixed annual fee, which is determined by the number of physical cores in a system.
There is also an option to have Azure Stack operated as a fully managed service.
Hybrid Cloud
Azure Stack can provide a “truly consistent hybrid cloud platform,” said Mike Neil, corporate VP, Azure infrastructure and management, in a Microsoft Azure blog post. “The ability to run consistent Azure services on-premises gets you full flexibility to decide where applications and workloads should reside.”
Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK)
ASDK is a free single server deployment that’s designed for trial purposes. ASDK can be downloaded here. The portal, Azure services, DevOps tools, and Marketplace content are the same across this ASDK release and integrated systems, so applications built against the ASDK will work when deployed to a multi-server system.
