Microsoft Azure Stack available as a technical preview

Source: Microsoft Azure website.

Microsoft's first technical preview of Microsoft Azure Stack has gone live. A spinoff 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 concerns over the complete migration to public cloud. To manage this complexity, Microsoft believes enterprises can use a hybrid cloud approach that cuts across infrastructure, applications and people to provide consistency across private, hosted and public clouds.

Azure Stack enables gives businesses the freedom to decide where applications and workloads reside. 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:

· A ‘write once, deploy to Azure or Azure Stack’ approach. Using APIs that are identical to those for Microsoft Azure, they can create applications based on open source or .NET technology that can 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 data centre 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 empowers IT professionals to deliver services to the business quickly, while continuing to steward corporate governance needs.

· Organisations can embrace hybrid cloud computing on their terms, addressing business and technical considerations like regulation, data sovereignty, customisation and latency.

Interested?

Read more about Azure Stack in the Microsoft Azure Blog

Download Azure Stack

Register for the webcast on February 3, 2016. Hosted by Mark Russinovich, CTO, Microsoft Azure and Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft Chief Architect, Enterprise Cloud, the session will discuss how Microsoft Azure Stack can deliver the power of Azure in the data centre.