During Ignite 2015, back in September, Microsoft announced Microsoft Azure Stack as the building block for its hybrid cloud strategy.
What Microsoft is saying with this move is that, despite public cloud adoption being huge with Azure in the second place just behind Amazon AWS, many customers still want to run part of their workloads on-premises but ask for consistence with the positive experience they have with public services. What is also true is that having the entire stack in house will help to optimise existing workloads which, at that point, will become easy to migrate to public services. Two birds with one stone.
Compared with the Azure Pack already available for System Center, Azure Stack offers improvements in many different dimensions: from the front end, with a single Browser Experience consistent with Azure, to Azure Resource Manager, Authorization Service, Subscription Management Service, etc.
That makes it compelling enough to convince existing Azure Pack’s user to adopt this new solution.
Last week Microsoft announced the first technical preview of Azure Stack available to download with the following features available for testing:
- Available as extra download
- PaaS
- Available as extra download
- DBaaS