Microsoft Ignite this week- the company announced that it is making available a version of Azure that can be hosted in your own datacenter.
The new software, called Microsoft Azure Stack allows you to run your own version of the company’s cloud platform on your own servers. The idea is that you’ll be able to use the same application development and deployment techniques from the hosted cloud platform on your own terms.
Azure Stack is essentially everything you see on the hosted version of the company’s cloud service, including the portal, in a single package for running on premise. The software will be available for the first time “this summer.”
Microsoft’s competitors like: Amazon’s EC2 and Google Cloud Compute don’t provide offerings for hosting your own service.
Summary of Technet Guest post by Mike Neil, General Manager for Windows Server, Microsoft:
Chicago at the Microsoft Ignite conference
Hybrid cloud is an ideal solution for many organizations bringing together the agility of public cloud and the control of on-premises systems.
“Today, we are announcing several new solutions that will continue to expand the industry’s most complete cloud:
• Microsoft Azure Stack, a next generation cloud infrastructure that brings Azure IaaS and PaaS capabilities to customers’ datacenters.
• Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016, the next versions of the popular application platform and management solutions.
• Microsoft Operations Management Suite, a new hybrid management solution that helps you manage your corporate workloads no matter where they run: Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMware, or OpenStack.”
Building Hybrid Clouds
Microsoft is the only cloud vendor that both builds, and runs its own hyper-scale datacenters and delivers that same technology back to customers’ and partners’ datacenters.
Next wave of cloud infrastructure.
Microsoft Azure Stack
– Microsoft Azure Stack delivers IaaS and PaaS services into your datacenter
– Easily blend enterprise applications such as SQL Server, SharePoint, and Exchange with modern distributed applications and services while maintaining centralized oversight.
– Azure Resource Manager (just released in preview last week), gives consistent application deployments every time, whether provisioned to Azure in the public cloud or Azure Stack in a datacenter environment. This approach is unique in the industry and gives developers the flexibility to create applications once and then decide where to deploy t later – all with role-based access control to meet your compliance needs.
– Azure Stack includes a scalable and flexible software-defined Network Controller and Storage Spaces Direct with: – automated sync and failover.
Shielded VMsand Guarded Hosts to bring “zero-trust” software-defined security to your private cloud. Securely segment organizations and workloads and centrally control and monitor access and administration rights.
Preview Azure Stack starting this summer.
New Technical Preview of Windows Server 2016 – Now Available
The next version of Windows Server will introduce Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Containers (expected in the third Technical Preview of Windows Server 2016 this summer).
Windows Server 2016 will also offer Azure Service Fabric, a platform for building and hosting application services that automatically scale and heal, bringing you the same underlying technology used to power highly scalable services like Skype for Business, Azure SQL Database, and Cortana.
The second Technical Preview of Windows Server 2016. offers a first look at Nano Server. Extending the advanced virtualization features:
• Rolling upgrades for Hyper-V and Storage clusters for even faster adoption of new updates and operating systems.
• Compute resiliency so virtual machines (VMs) continue running even if the compute cluster fabric service fails.
• Storage Replica updates for synchronous storage replication for affordable backup and disaster recovery.
Managing a Hybrid World
Today’s hybrid reality means applications and data are spread across multiple vendors’ environments. While you may not control all the platforms they run on you still need to manage and control these assets to help your organization meet business, compliance and regulatory needs.
Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS)
OMS now extends your System Center investments and Microsoft best practices to simplify management of your assets at a lower cost than competitive solutions, wherever they live-
– any instance (physical, virtual or container)
– and any cloud, including: your data center, Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMware, and OpenStack,
OMS tracks and manages:
• Log Analytics: collect and search millions of records in seconds across thousands of machines to identify the root cause of operational issues.
• Security: identify malware status and missing system updates, and collect security related events to perform forensic, audit and breach analysis.
• Availability: enable application and data protection for all servers and applications, no matter where they reside with cloud-based backup and site recovery.
• Automation: orchestrate complex and repetitive operations for more efficient and cost-effective hybrid cloud management.
Expect cloud-based patching, inventory, alerting, container management, and more later in the year.
New Technical Preview of System Center 2016 – Available This Week
System Center 2016 has new; provisioning, monitoring and automation capabilities for your software-defined datacenter. iT adds:
• Improved Linux management, including Desired State Configuration (DSC) support, native SSH support, and improved LAMP stack monitoring.
• Software Defined Datacenter management, including mixed mode cluster upgrades, enhanced Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) management, and deployment of software-defined networking (SDN) at scale.
• Powerful new monitoring for Azure, Office365, SQL Server and Exchange.
