Organizations have a wide range of options for dipping their toes into cloud computing. More businesses are looking at cloud solutions if they have not already embraced the cloud for running production workloads and services. The public cloud environments offered up by today’s providers provide access to world-class data centers, hardware, and high availability mechanisms that most businesses today simply would not have the resources to acquire on their own.
However, for many businesses, running all workloads in the public cloud such as Microsoft Azure may not be an option. Many are considering or architecting hybrid cloud solutions where some resources are located in a public cloud environment and others are still housed on-premises. There may be regulatory, data sovereignty, customization, or possibly latency concerns that necessitate certain workloads or applications be run on-premises.
OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform that has attracted many with the promise of the look and feel of public cloud environments on-premises. There have certainly been challenges encountered by many with OpenStack like technical complexities and support issues that arise when using open source solutions.
Microsoft has released Azure Stack to help bridge the gap between on-premises environments and public cloud.
- What is Microsoft Azure Stack?
What use cases does it fit?
How is it deployed?
In this post, we’ll take a look at Microsoft Azure Stack and its Use Cases.
What is Microsoft Azure Stack?
Microsoft touts Azure Stack as simply an extension of Azure in the public cloud. Microsoft’s Azure Stack platform is a hybrid cloud solution that brings Azure cloud functionality and operational mechanics down to the on-premises environment. It is essentially Microsoft’s proprietary answer to OpenStack’s open source solution. Since not all businesses can run all applications in the public cloud, having a way to bridge the gap between traditional on-premises environments and specifically Azure public cloud can allow businesses to take advantage of both worlds.
Azure Stack provides a way to run Azure public cloud applications locally on-premises. It allows developers to have a consistent development look and feel when working on-premises as they would in the Azure public cloud. This consistency between how applications are architected between on-premises and in the Azure public cloud is the beauty of Azure Stack. This includes leveraging the same development tools and DevOps processes between environments.
You might initially think that Azure Stack would be in direct competition with the service and platform offerings found in Azure. However, rather than being competing products or services, Azure and Azure Stack are complimentary and meant to be used in conjunction with one another in most use cases.
What is Azure Stack used for?
There are three common use cases that Microsoft cites between Azure and Azure Stack.
- Edge and disconnected solutions – As mentioned, this use case highlights the complimentary nature of Azure and Azure Stack.
- Cloud applications that come under regulatory scrutiny – Generally speaking there are vast differences between traditional applications engineered on-premises and those that are developed in Azure. With Azure Stack, developers can develop and deploy applications in the Azure environment in the cloud and then easily deploy those same applications on-premises with Azure Stack without any code changes. Businesses may have different versions of the same application due to regulatory compliance. These same applications that may run in the Azure public cloud for one business unit can be redeployed on-premises using Azure Stack with little to no modifications.
- Running Cloud Applications On-premises – Azure Stack allows running cloud-native applications on-premises. Additionally, customers can use Azure services, containers, serverless, and microservice architecture to complement existing traditional server and application architecture that may exist on-premises.
If customers have business reasons to process data locally (including regulatory, latency and other), using Azure Stack, data can be processed locally and then synchronized with Azure for additional processing if needed, especially when connectivity between the site and the Azure public cloud is poor or intermittent. This is an especially strong use case for certain niche environments such as cruise ships, remote factory environments and other “disconnected” type environments gathering large quantities of data but unable to communicate that data in bulk.
Data can be aggregated locally with Azure Stack and transmitted to the Azure public cloud at a later or scheduled interval.
Microsoft Azure Stack aims to meet three core objectives for its customer base including consistent application development, availability of Azure services on-premises, and integrated delivery experience.
Consistent application development:
Using the same application model, APIs, and portal that is enabled in Azure by the Azure Resource Manager, customers can take advantage of and utilize Azure Stack in the same way, all from the on-premises environment. Also, this allows easily adopting DevOps operational practices on-premises that may have only been possible in the Azure public cloud. This also allows speeding along development.
Since developers are using the same practices and tools on-premises with Azure Stack as in the Azure public cloud environment, the consistency, speed, and efficiency of development are all increased exponentially.
Availability of Azure services on-premises
Since the same application, services, and platform model is available on-premises as in the public cloud, customers can operate at much great scale on-premises than without Azure Stack. Services such as Azure PaaS services and Azure Functions can extend into on-premises environments by way of Azure Stack. Customers also get the extensibility of Azure marketplace applications available to them on-premises with Azure Stack, thus allowing access to a large range of extensibility options in the on-premises environment. Azure Active Directory can also tie into the Azure Stack environment on-premises.
Integrated Delivery Experience
Azure Stack is delivered to your on-premises environment by way of fully integrated solutions from Cisco Dell, HPE, Huawei, and Lenovo. With the fully integrated solution, customers do not have to worry about implementation and hardware vendors working together correctly up and down the stack. The solution is delivered with the preconfigured components working correctly and designed for performance, interoperability, and stability.
How is Microsoft Azure Stack Installed?
There are a couple of deployment options for Azure Stack.
The options include:
- Azure Stack Integrated Systems
- Azure Stack Development Kit
What are the differences between the two?
Azure Stack integrated systems are what was alluded to earlier when referring to the integrated delivery experience. Microsoft has formulated partnerships between hardware vendors that has allowed creating turnkey solutions with integrated hardware and software systems. Deployment environments range from 4-12 nodes in the Azure Stack cluster.
Conversely, the Azure Stack Developer Kit is a different solution altogether. This is a single-node deployment of Azure that is not meant for production environments. It is rather a deployment option aimed at evaluating and learning about Azure Stack. You can quickly Google and find many who are running and testing Azure Stack in a lab environment by way of the Azure Stack Development Kit.
Where does Microsoft Azure Stack fit in the on-premises environment? Is this solution meant to take the place of your existing virtual environment either being served out by Hyper-V or VMware?
Azure Stack is not a replacement for your on-premises hypervisor. In fact, it would not be efficient or cost-effective deployed in this mindset. What Microsoft has accomplished and created with Azure Stack is a supported hybrid cloud software stack that allows organizations to effectively bridge the gap between on-premises and Azure public cloud environments. It is perhaps arguably the only vendor that has been successful at doing this by way of the Azure Stack offering.
Azure Stack truly enables developers and development lifecycles and DevOps processes to seamlessly move between on-premises and Azure public cloud environments with little to no changes being made. This can allow organizations to engineer CICD pipelines that mirror one another between environments.
Also, especially in corner cases such as edge or “disconnected” environments, Azure Stack makes a lot of sense when Azure public cloud connectivity is sparse, intermittent, or unreliable.
Concluding Thoughts
Microsoft has truly created a hybrid cloud solution with Azure Stack, with which businesses can truly operate development and DevOps procedures the same way on-premises as they do in the Azure public cloud.
Azure Stack is delivered as a turnkey solution by way of hardware partnerships with select vendors or in a development kit format, allowing organizations to evaluate and learn the Azure Stack ecosystem. The platform has many strong use cases; however, it is not meant to be a replacement for your existing on-premises virtualization implementation such as Hyper-V or VMware environments. It is rather meant to be a framework to allow organizations to efficiently operate and develop applications and services on-premises the same way they can in the Azure public cloud along with the same development and DevOps tools and procedures.
Microsoft has created a unique offering with Azure Stack that allows organizations to have a turnkey, vendor-supported hybrid cloud environment that truly bridges the gap between on-premises and public cloud.
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