Microsoft Launches Azure Stack Technical Preview

Microsoft will be releasing its first technical preview of Azure Stack on Friday 29 January, delivering what the company is calling the “next step” in its hybrid cloud strategy.

The premise of Azure Stack is simple. Much like open source OpenStack, Azure Stack gives customers the ability to run Azure cloud computing services in their own data centres, and shift workloads between on-premise and Azure in true hybrid fashion all on the same platform.

Microsoft believes its Azure Stack will fare it well against cloud competitors Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google, as well as OpenStack.

Scale

“With Azure Stack, Microsoft is bringing proven innovation – including IaaS and higher level PaaS services – from hyper-scale datacenters to on-premises, enterprise-scale environments to meet customers’ business requirements,” wrote Mike Neil, corporate vice president for enterprise cloud at Microsoft.

Microsoft sees a number of benefits for customers and itself in Azure Stack. App developers are one audience Azure Stack is targeting, as they can use a ‘write once, deploy to Azure or Azure Stack’ approach. “

Using APIs that are identical to Microsoft Azure, they can create applications based on open source or .NET technology that can easily run on-premises or in the public cloud. They can also leverage the rich Azure ecosystem to jumpstart their Azure Stack development efforts,” wrote Neil.

Azure Stack could also drive the adoption of hybrid cloud in the enterprise by meeting data sovereignty, latency, and regulation rules with a hybrid approach.

Customers access Azure Stack through the Azure Portal, which mimics what customers would find if using pure Azure Cloud. However, for this first technical preview, early testers are limited to using Azure Stack with just one machine.

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