Today, Microsoft announced the release of their Azure Stack offering. If you are not familiar with this offering, think of it as “Azure services running on-premises.” Azure Stack gets installed in your data center or offered up by a service provider for you to consume. The release of Azure Stack has been a long while coming as it was first announced in late 2015.
A Walk Down Memory Lane..
Remember those days when you needed to spin up a VM to test something? There wasn’t a lot of choices. You had to either reach out to IT to request that they spin up a VM for you and provide you access, or you could spin one up on your laptop using a type 2 hypervisor which had its limitations. Typically, this had to go through an approval process that sometimes took weeks. For those of you graybeards, who have been around the industry as long as I have, you didn’t even have the luxury of virtualization and you had to request a server. How did we ever get anything done back then?
Not so long ago companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google started to offer up hyperscale environments where you could allocate resources and pay for them as you use them. The sheer size of these environments allowed them to offer these resources at a low price point. This allowed companies to move from a CAPEX to an OPEX model which started the evolution of the public cloud. However, there are many companies that have either security concerns or compliance requirements that keep them from taking advantage of the public cloud and all it has to offer or those who wish to have complete control of their data and resources.
Enter the private cloud, hosted in your datacenter or a service provider’s datacenter. Companies must evolve and to stay relevant in the industry they need to focus on providing value to their customers. In the case of the private cloud, those customers could be your own internal business units. These BUs need the capability to have self-service deployment and agility.
Prior to Azure Stack there was Azure Pack which provided these capabilities. This was a big step in the right direction as it provided a lot of these capabilities but there was something missing. What if you had a workload running on Azure Pack and you wanted to be able to run it in public Azure without having to make any changes? This was not easily done as the APIs were not consistent. Microsoft Azure had already seen so much growth that a new user experience was in order which gave Microsoft a chance to build a new portal and a new deployment model (resource manager). This left a lot of users in a state of confusion having to keep up with learning and supporting both.
Fast Forward to Today..
Now that Azure Stack has been developed, you get consistency across both private and public clouds. The APIs are consistent, the deployment models are consistent, and the user experience is consistent. Users can now log in with the same identities utilizing ADFS or Azure AD. Developers can use the same tools that they are familiar with. Think of Azure Stack as being an extension of Azure bringing agility and faster innovation to cloud computing, all behind your firewall. This allows for a true hybrid cloud experience.
Image courtesy of Microsoft
Purchasing, Licensing, Pricing , Support, and Roadmap..
Azure Stack is available for purchase for September delivery through three hardware vendors, Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo on pre-qualified hardware. Azure Stack is initially available in 46 countries. It will be delivered as an integrated system, with software pre-installed. Cisco and Huawei recently announced they will be joining the other three hardware manufacturers. Expect to see their offerings made available soon.
To help developers get started, Microsoft also announced the Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK). This kit is the free, single server deployment of Azure Stack. This will allow you to start your development work right away. Make sure you follow the hardware and deployment requirements.
The software licensing will be available via EA and CSP for the pay-as-you-use package. If you have an existing EA Azure subscription, you can use that same one for consuming Azure Stack. CSP providers will be able to use the same tenant subscriptions for customers as well. MSDN, Free trials, and Biz Spark offers cannot be used with Azure Stack. You will be able to use on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server license with Azure Stack as long as you comply with product licensing. If you BYOL you will only be charged for consumption on the base VM.
Image courtesy of Microsoft
Azure Stack services will be priced the same as Azure, on a pay-as-you-use model. The following services will be charged on a consumption basis: Virtual Machines, Azure Storage, App Service, Azure Functions, Azure Service Fabric (CY18), and Azure Container Service (CY18). You will be billed for Azure Stack usage as part of your regular Azure invoice. For those operating in a “disconnected mode” (unable to transmit metering information), a capacity model pricing package is available. This is an annual subscription based on a fixed fee on the number of physical cores in the system.
Note: You are not charged for the virtual machines and software required to power the Azure Stack infrastructure.
With Azure Stack, there will be two support contracts, one purchased from the hardware vendor and one from Microsoft. For those customers who have an existing Premiere or Azure support contract with Microsoft today, it will cover Azure Stack as well.
Initially the Azure Stack offering footprint will be a minimum 4 servers and a max of 12, with 1 scale unit per region across a single region. A scale unit is a set of servers with identical CPU, memory, network, and storage configuration. Each scale unit may differ. One or more scale units make up a region. Multiple regions make up a cloud.
Image courtesy of Microsoft
See the following table for features that will be delivered after initial release.
Image courtesy of Microsoft
Summary
Azure Stack brings purpose-built integrated systems to your data center that allows speed and agility to help you modernize your applications across a hybrid environment. It allows developers to build applications using a consistent set of services, tools and processes. Operations is now able to deploy to the location that meets the needs of their business, meeting technical and regulatory requirements, all while paying only for what you use.
For additional information on Azure Stack refer to this link.
