I’ve spent the better part of the last 4 years banging on about how the hybrid cloud should be the goal that all cloud services work towards. Whilst the argument can be made that this might be born out of some protectionist feeling for on-premise infrastructure it’s more that I could never see large organisations fully giving up control of their infrastructure to the cloud. However the benefits of using the cloud, both in terms of its IaaS and PaaS capabilities, are undeniable and thus the ideal scenario is a blend between these two. Only one cloud provider has seriously considered this position, likely because of their large footprint in the enterprise space. Today Microsoft has launched the next stage in its cloud strategy: the Microsoft Azure Stack.
The Azure Stack appears to be an extension of the Azure Pack that Microsoft released a couple years ago, bringing many of the backend features that Microsoft itself uses to power the Azure Cloud to the enterprise. However whilst the Azure Pack was more of an interface that brought a whole lot of tools together the Azure Stack is its own set of technologies that elevates your current IT infrastructure with Azure features. As to what those features are exactly Microsoft isn’t being more specific than saying IaaS and PaaS currently although the latter indicates that some of the more juicy Azure features, like Table Storage, could potentially find their way into your datacenter.
The idealized hybrid cloud scenario that many have been talking about for years is an on-premise deployment that’s able to burst out to the cloud for additional resources when the need strikes. Whilst this was theoretically possible, if you invested the time to develop or customize your applications to take advantage of it, the examples of successful implementations were few and far between. The improvements that come with the Microsoft Azure Stack make such a scenario far more possible than it ever was before, allowing developers to create applications against a common platform that remains consistent no matter where the application finds itself running. At the same time supporting infrastructure applications can benefit from those same advantages, greatly reducing complexity in administering such an environment.
This comes hand in hand with the announcement of Microsoft Operations Manager which is essentially the interface to your on-premise cloud. Microsoft is positioning it as the one interface to rule them all as it’s capable of interfacing with all the major cloud providers as well as the various on-premise solutions that their competitors provide. The initial release will focus on 4 key features: Log Analytics, Security, Availability and Automation with more features to be coming at a “rapid pace” as the product matures. For me the most interesting features are the availability (apparently enabling a cloud restore of an application regardless of where it sits) and the automation stuff, but I’ll need to have a play with it first before I call out my favourite.
The Microsoft Azure Stack is by far the most exciting announcement to come out of Redmond in a long time as it shows they’re dedicated to providing the same experience to their enterprise customers as they currently deliver to their cloud counterparts. The cloud wall that has existed ever since the inception of the first cloud service is quickly breaking down, enabling enterprise IT to do far more than it ever could. This new Microsoft, which is undoubtedly being powered by Nadella’s focus on building upon the strong based he created in the Servers and Tools division, is one that its competitors should be wary of as they’re quickly eating everyone else’s lunch.
