Reinventing Datacenter Agility Through Cloud Service Delivery
In order to understand how Azure Stack works, it’s important to take a step back and think about the people and processes involved in running and operating a cloud. The cloud era of computing more closely aligns the economic principles of supply and demand with IT operations. There are people, Cloud Consumers, such as developers, IT pros, DevOps, who need resources to do their job, building and running business applications, and there are organizations, Cloud Providers, who provide those resources to these customers. In Azure, Microsoft acts as the Cloud Provider and anyone who has a subscription to Azure is a Cloud Consumer. Infodat can help you to develop an architecture and roadmap to migrate to the cloud.
Microsoft Azure Stack Vision
Azure Stack extends the Azure vision by bringing the cloud model of computing to every datacenter. Azure Stack is a new hybrid cloud platform product that enables organizations to deliver Azure services from their own datacenter in a way that is consistent with Azure. In this way customers, can focus on business innovation rather than spend time building their own cloud computing platform. Organizations can create these Azure services from datacenter resources – enabling developers and IT professionals to quickly provision and scale services using the same self-service experience found in Azure. The product also allows IT organizations to leverage the same management and automation tools used with Azure to customize the service delivery experience to the business units they serve. This all adds up to an environment in which application developers can maximize their productivity using a ‘write once, deploy to Azure or Azure Stack’ approach, because the Azure APIs are consistent regardless of where the resources are provisioned – Azure Stack is simply an extension of Azure. Part of the value of this approach is bringing the large ecosystem of operating systems, frameworks, languages, tools, and applications we are building in Azure to individual datacenters. Developers can create applications based on a variety of technologies such as Windows, Linux, .NET, PHP, Ruby or Java that can be deployed and operated the same way on-premises or in Microsoft Azure datacenters. They are also able to leverage the rich Azure ecosystem of templates, tools, and applications to jumpstart their Azure Stack development and operational efforts.
Cloud Service Delivery with Azure Stack
Since Azure Stack is fundamentally born from Azure, the design challenge was clear. In Azure, Microsoft operates datacenters around the world each with tens of thousands of servers and a minimum “scale unit” of twenty racks. When we talk about ‘hyper-scale’ in Azure, this is what we mean. But designing services to also run effectively in the enterprise required creating a shared framework that allowed the services to be scaled and operated at ‘enterprise-scale’ – meaning significantly smaller scale point. The graphic below provides a simplified view of the Azure Stack product architecture.
