Microsoft brings Azure to the datacentre with Azure Stack

At the Microsoft Ignite conference, Chicago, Microsoft announced its new solution that would bring its famed Azure cloud platform to the datacenter. Called Microsoft Azure Stack, it brings to the datacenter Azure IaaS and PaaS capabilities. Microsoft Azure Stack extends the agile Azure model of application development and deployment to the datacenter. With IaaS and PaaS services into the datacenter users can easily blend enterprise applications such as SQL Server, SharePoint, and Exchange with modern distributed applications and services while maintaining centralized oversight. Using Azure Resource Manager (just released in preview last week), users get 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 them later - all with role-based access control to meet compliance needs. [caption id=“attachment_2229062” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Screengrab from Azure Stack demo video[/caption] Built on the same core technology as Azure, Azure Stack packages Microsoft’s investments in automated and software-defined infrastructure from our public cloud datacenters and delivers them for a more flexible and secure datacenter environment. For example, Azure Stack includes a scalable and flexible software-defined Network Controller and Storage Spaces Direct with automated sync and failover. Shielded VMs and Guarded Hosts bring “zero-trust” software-defined security to the private cloud so users can securely segment organizations and workloads and centrally control and monitor access and administration rights. Furthermore, Azure Stack will simplify the complex process of deploying private/hosted clouds based on our experience building the Microsoft Cloud Platform System, a converged infrastructure solution. Customers can preview Azure Stack starting this summer.