How To Differentiate with Microsoft’s Azure Stack

During Microsoft Ignite, I talked about how I attended to get coverage of every aspect of the Azure Stack product. Microsoft delivered on that and more.

As a quick note I should mention, that to deploy Azure Stack as intended, you should be sure to follow all the guidelines and guidance carefully.

Azure Stack is really a commercial product for larger businesses and service providers. Its purpose is to deliver a new Hybrid cloud consumption model accompanied with new cloud offerings supplemented by new managed services. This opens new opportunities and new ways of thinking about IT.

However, deploying Azure Stack without understanding the business side of the product or understanding what (technical) problems or challenges you are trying to solve can set you up for failure. I encourage everyone considering Azure Stack to watch the Ignite Sessions covering the business and application scenarios. Technical sessions are also covered there.

“After four days submerged in a wealth of information, it was pretty clear that Azure Stack is not a product you simply deploy out of the box.”

One Ecosystem, One Brand

Azure Stack is an extension of Azure. It will give you the same experience and reliability customers already have in public Azure, while also upholding the same Azure reputation and reliability customers are accustomed to.

Microsoft can provide customers with a true consistent Hybrid experience with Azure services, on any cloud they choose. The underlying hardware is an important integrated piece of the solution and tightly coupled with the software-defined layers on top.

Any misalignment causes impact on the entire solution.

Differentiate Your Business with Azure Stack

How do you differentiate your business with Azure Stack?

Bringing the Cloud consumption model with all its services from public to private or hosted clouds has never been done before. There are numerous benefits with this. Azure Stack brings Azure IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services to your cloud in a cloud consumption model.

Azure stack is leveraging these public cloud services with additional services, complementing them in a local cloud consumption model, and giving companies a large advantage above competitors who are still using the traditional model. Connect the Azure public cloud to your Azure Stack cloud, and you can differentiate even more by having a true, consistent hybrid Cloud.

Benefits and Functionalities of Microsoft’s Azure Stack

Business Capabilities and Benefits:

Only hybrid cloud platform that is truly consistent with a leading public cloud
Offers foundational (IaaS) services as well as PaaS/SaaS services to gradually transition to
Provide Instant compliance with international and industry-specific compliance standards
Get an out of the box auditing trail for the complete stack, which conforms to Hipaa, PCI, Fedramp and more
Benefit from a powerful reseller model.
Enable and onboard new customers otherwise restricted to their older traditional IT model.
Create unique offers per region. You can provide different services per region, mixing and matching the underlying resources and associated performance.
Transfer from capital infrastructure cost (capex) to operational costs (opex) by using a pay-per-use cloud model.
Monetize Azure Stack using chargeback data generated by the customizable billing meters.
Deliver additional services, building your catalog through the marketplace.
Control and reduce shadow IT. Developers already adopting Azure or doing shadow IT elsewhere, now can safely switch to locally controlled Azure services.
Save on server licensing costs by using Microsoft Azure cloud on-boarding benefits.
Use or offer new higher-level managed services made possible with a (hybrid) cloud model like advisory and security services.
Monitor and track usage through the portal or API’s in one uniform way across clouds, analyze the data and enhance your application.
Cut down costs by having a single pane of glass detailing all usage and costs.
Companies can now develop for financial incentives instead of the usual technology incentives.
Transition IT towards a stable profit center instead of the traditional fluctuating cost center by using agile DevOps practices.

Infrastructure Benefits

Pick your own hardware setup (even with an integrated system) with beefy CPU’s and speedy NVME disks.
The network is local to you, no fee for network traffic, low latency, great performance.
Benefit from the new super-fast storage spaces direct solution using ReFS.
Add a physical server to the Azure Stack scale unit (cluster) for instant resource expansion.
Retire/remove servers from the scale unit the same way.
You can start small with only 4 nodes and expand up to 16 nodes.

“Azure Stack brings the power of the new Microsoft software-defined networking, delivering technologies like VFP, OVSDB, VXLAN, BGP, NAT, network security groups (NSG), iDNS, user defined routes, packet direct, Switch Embedded Teaming (SET).”

Functionalities

Azure Stack servers are hyper-converged using software-defined networking and storage in Windows Server 2016.
Load-balancing (SLB) and distributed firewall are brought from Azure to Azure Stack.
Benefit from Infrastructure as Code (IaC), so you can deploy or export your environment as code.
Azure Stack’s Cloud model enables true agile DevOps practices
Use higher level PaaS services like the App, Container or Service Fabric services and benefit from true cloud elasticity, scalability and agility.
Developers want clean code and deploy their apps instantly to finished services without infrastructure or software component dependency hassles.
Provide MySQL and SQL DB as a service.
Leverage ASC, DSC, Docker and custom script VM extensions as a method for deploying software and configuration in an automated way into your VM’s.
Use existing community-made quickstart ARM templates from GitHub to rollout your environment and get to know ARM.
Use new Web apps, Mobile apps, and API apps. Use MySQL, PHP or deploy WordPress and other web-enabled applications from a template or from the App gallery.
Create custom ‘Resource Providers’ under the Azure Stack admin context and provide your own custom services with Azure Stack.
Use Azure Site Recovery (ASR) as a migration path.
Use Azure AD or Active Directory with ADFS as your identity source.
Additional Azure services such as Service Bus and Azure Backup service come with Azure Stack over time. Make use of multiple fault domains (clusters) in one region.
VM Self-service diagnostics; VM redeployment, Serial Output, screen capture, VM local user password reset.

Implications of a Hybrid Environment

Extend your environment to Azure or to other Azure Stacks in a different rack, room, datacenter, city, country, or continent!
Achieve cross-premises and stack-to-stack connectivity with site-to-site VPN.
Create true Hybrid cloud apps by using load-balancing across two locations.
Hyper-Scale to Azure when you need more capacity in case of an event. Only pay for the resources used.
Host compute front ends in Azure in multiple geographical regions; host back end data locally in Azure Stack.
Use and mix storage, compute, and network capacity where it makes sense.
Use hybrid identity with Azure Active Directory and on-premise Active Directory.
Benefit from a consistent disaster-recovery and backup plan offsite with instant fail-over to another region.
Provide Azure services more local to companies where latency and jitter to public or to the internet in general is a big issue.
Use Azure Stack as a mobile datacenter at remote oil rigs, hospitals, factories, ships, and airplanes in a disconnected scenario and sync with public or other clouds when connected.
Gain the flexibility to instantly switch workloads to Azure or other Stacks.
Benefit from the data sovereignty and regulation options provided with a consistent hybrid cloud. Place data and workloads in clouds that comply with company policies.
Dev-test in Azure Stack or on the free one-node developer kit and publish into production on Azure or Azure Stack.
Easily relocate applications and solutions developed on Azure to another location than the public cloud.
Use storage accounts to provide file storage via a file share or blob endpoint over HTTPS.
ISV’s can develop marketplace apps or app solutions that span Azure and Azure Stack.
Provide Hybrid monitoring of Azure and Azure Stack assets with OMS from multiple Azure regions.

Azure Stack Consistency

Benefit from consistent portal experience and developer/admin tools for every platform (Mac OS X/Linux/Windows).
Use consistent administrative and cloud service API’s, that work the same way in any cloud. Customers can now invest heavily in automating development, deployment and operation activities knowing that they will not have to be rewritten.
Azure Stack provides infrastructure or application deployment templates for any environment, no matter where you run your test, staging or production environment.
Standardize RBAC, usage, and audit capabilities that work the same way across all cloud services.
ISV’s can create solutions that work the same way on public and private.
Use existing third-party marketplace items developed for Azure by Microsoft partners in Azure Stack’s marketplace.
Microsoft guarantees the consistency between clouds with regular update release cycles, so you don’t need to spend resources attempting to do that on your own.

I hope this post shed some light what it takes to roll out an Azure Stack environment, why an integrated system is important, how the new cloud consumption model benefits to the organization, and how you can differentiate yourself using that model with Azure Stack.