Microsoft Announces First Technical Preview of Microsoft Azure Stack

Microsoft announced that the first Technical Preview of Microsoft Azure Stack, will go live on Friday 29 February 2016. Born from Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack enables organisations to deliver Azure services from their own data centres, and is the only hybrid cloud platform that is consistent with a leading public cloud. 

While Microsoft is seeing rapid adoption of Azure, with nearly 100,000 new subscriptions every month, the company recognises that enterprises still have business concerns, such as data sovereignty or regulatory issues, over the complete migration to public cloud. To manage this complexity, Microsoft believes enterprises have to approach cloud as a model instead of a place, using a hybrid cloud approach that cuts across infrastructure, applications and people, to provide consistency across private, hosted and public clouds.

With Azure Stack, Microsoft is bringing proven innovation from hyper-scale data centres to on-premises, enterprise-scale environments to meet the varying business requirements of enterprises. The advantages include:

·       Application developers can maximise their productivity using 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.

·       IT professionals can transform on-premises datacentre resources into Azure IaaS/PaaS services while maintaining oversight using the same management and automation tools that Microsoft uses to operate Azure. This approach to cloud enables IT professionals to have a valuable seat at the table – they are empowered to deliver services to the business quickly, while continuing to steward corporate governance needs.

·       Organisations can embrace hybrid cloud computing on their terms by helping them address business and technical considerations like regulation, data sovereignty, customisation and latency. Azure Stack enables that by giving businesses the freedom to decide where applications and workloads reside without being constrained by technology.

Check out the Microsoft Azure Blog for full details on the latest Azure Stack announcement