Microsoft, the leading provider of legacy hardware and software products, cloud-based software and productivity solutions has always managed to stay ahead in terms of new technological developments and software inventions.
Its public cloud platform- Azure is growing exponentially, giving a tough competition to its market contemporaries – AWS and Google. While Azure was primarily focused towards the public cloud, Microsoft expanded its horizons to cover the hybrid cloud opportunity with Azure Stack.
Hybrid cloud is rising as a popular IT service adoption model with over 79.7% of large organizations already having a hybrid cloud strategy in place, against 51.4% who are using both public and private cloud, as per an IDC study commissioned by Dell EMC. With hybrid cloud, users get the benefits of both private and public cloud environments, while getting the freedom to operate in a work environment of their choice.
Azure Stack acts as a subset of its public cloud model – Azure. With it, Microsoft aims to provide the benefits of Azure public cloud services within the enterprise datacenters. The applications and VMs use the same Azure Resource Manager on Azure Stack and Azure, thus users can easily migrate between the two services.
Azure Stack promises consistent application development, purpose-built integrated systems and on-premise availability. Developers can take advantage of its PaaS services like back-ends tools, storage and API functions.
Microsoft recently launched the latest Technical Preview 3 (TP3) downloadable update for Azure Stack. The update includes new features that will enable modern application capabilities and other functionalities related to infrastructure and security. Some of the important features include, but are not limited to:
- Easy deployment with ADFS for disconnected scenarios.
- Enhanced infrastructure management capabilities like advanced alerting.
- Ability to use Azure VM scale set for scale out workloads.
- Ability to collect content from Azure marketplace in Stack.
- Ability to create templates and deploy them with temp disks that are consistent with Azure.
Azure Stack integrated systems will be available for order from mid of the CY17 and TP3 is going to be up for final technical preview before its GA.
