Microsoft’s Azure Stack hybrid cloud enters technical preview

Today, the secret weapon is out, as Microsoft announces that Friday, January 29th will see the release of the first technical preview of Azure Stack, an early and free way for developers and IT pros to mess around with the tool.

Microsoft said the hybrid model allows customers to address business and technical considerations such as regulations, data sovereignty, customisation, and network latency, allowing them to place workloads locally, or in the cloud, independently of the technology deployed.

This means developers and IT admins will be able to use one set of tools to target the platform (including Visual Studio and PowerShell) and won’t have to worry about whether their apps will eventually run on premises or in the public Azure cloud.

In order to better meet that need, Microsoft is launching a hybrid cloud version of its Azure platform.

Microsoft chose Ubuntu Linux for its new Azure Stack offering because the former is one of the most popular and preferred operating system for the private cloud, now that Canonical announced it is being used on more than 64% of all OpenStack deployments.

With the Microsoft Cloud Platform, CSP and Azure Hybrid Services, our partners can deliver an unparalleled amount of flexibility and choice – tailoring solutions for specific customer needs. “Azure Stack enables an incredibly important and compelling hybrid story that is very important for many organizations”.

Consequently, Azure Stack likely will see product release sometime this year, alongside Microsoft’s 2016 server products.

Applications for Azure Stack can be created with open source tools or the.NET development framework, Microsoft said.

For companies that will buy new hardware to test Azure Stack, Microsoft recommends Dell R630 and HPE DL 360 Gen 9 servers.

“As the first to extend its comprehensive vulnerability management software to Azure users, Tenable makes it easy for organisations to embrace the Cloud by identifying any known threats or vulnerabilities and remediating them before it is too late”, he added.

Not every customer can take advantage of this, though. As if pretending to have been shipped in from an alternate universe, Azure Stack sported a reverse color scheme from Azure. The self-service portal for setting up Azure resources, for instance, relies on the same provisioning infrastructure and offers the same APIs in both the public cloud version of Azure and in Azure Stack. Organizations can use Azure Resource Manager templates across both, which are JSON based.

Microsoft published hardware requirements for the Azure Stack technical preview last month.

“In contrast to Windows Azure Pack, where we needed System Center to perform tasks on the underlying fabric, Azure Stack does this by directly communicating with the resource providers”, van der Peijl explained in a blog post.

“And with Azure Stack, we’re now doing the hard work of translating these learnings for on-premise environments so customers can benefit from speed and innovation of the cloud model without location constraints”.