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Private cloud with Microsoft Azure Stack

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Article from ADMIN 44/2018

By Florian Frommherz , By Michael Lüscher

Azure Stack is an Azure extension that implements an on-premises data center for consistent hybrid cloud deployments.

Up to now, services were mostly available online from a public cloud. Although Windows Server, System Center, and Windows Azure Pack are components for a hybrid cloud, setting up a private cloud required great know-how and effort – something that Microsoft certainly changes with Azure Stack.

Objectives

The virtualization layer plays only a minimal role in this first version of Azure Stack, so it is of interest to companies whose classic virtualization is based on a hypervisor other than Hyper-V. The added value of Azure Stack is found in the other layers and the cloud services it enables, for which virtualization is ultimately only a means to an end. In other words, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) should complete platform as a service (PaaS) and not serve as the primary solution.

Microsoft does not regard Azure Stack as a playground for customers with the urge to handle their own servers, but rather as a highly integrated solution with software and hardware components that are mostly hidden from admins and that have been defined, validated, and, above all, put through their paces by Microsoft and selected hardware manufacturers. This self-contained concept is designed to provide companies the greatest possible consistency with the Azure cloud model (Figure 1).

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