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Dec 14

Azure Stack: A summary of key benefits.

Categories:

Azure Stack, FrontPage

Intro

By now most organizations know what Azure Stack is and how they can use its foundational services. But what about all the additional benefits you instantly get by using Azure Stack with its new service provider orientated Cloud model? Flexible cloud benefits which are not available in traditional IT environments are now delivered as an integrated part of Azure Stack. Leveraging foundational services like IaaS with additional PaaS services combined with these additional benefits complementing them, opens up a whole new innovative business model.

Let’s summarize the most important benefits and divide them into several important categories.

See the Azure Stack Survival Guide for more information about a particular benefit or comment below.

Business

  • Only hybrid cloud platform that is truly consistent with a leading public cloud.
  • Offers foundational (IaaS) services and PaaS/SaaS services where customers and IT gradually transition to.
  •  Transfer from capital infrastructure cost (Capex) to operational costs (Opex) by using a pay-per-use consumption cloud model.
  • Your own piece of public Azure in a box with dedicated performance, dedicated security under your control.
  • The new Cloud model inherits DevOps practices and delivers continuous integration and deployment of applications.
  • By using agile DevOps practices IT transitions towards a stable profit center instead of the traditional fluctuating cost center.
  • Companies are able to cut down costs by having a single pane of glass detailing all usage and costs. They are now able to develop for financial incentives instead of the usual technology incentives.
  • Mature provider centric self-service functionality with RBAC through portal and API’s.
  • Ability to purchase AzureStack-as-a-Service (Capex vs Opex)  with predictable monthly costs based on usage. There will be pay per use offers based on software usage but also based on the hardware usage! All in one pay per use package.
  • Azure Stack is offered as an closed appliance (sealed hosts), its software and hardware infrastructure is totally automated and secure,  it allows you to cut down on infrastructure management and integration costs.
  • Azure Stack is a new future ready private cloud solution with a public cloud model concentrated around the application. It directly competes against established infrastructure focused private cloud solutions like Nutanix, VMware, OpenStack etc.
  • IT Pro’s can now focus more on the application and the business value behind that application, gradually transitioning to CloudOps or DevOps practices.
  • Portability and consistency across platforms. Deploy, export or redeploy complete PaaS applications and IaaS enviroments as Code. In the same region, another AzureStack region or in Azure.
  • Benefit from the agility of a flexible, speedy and elastic cloud.
  • Using the public cloud model in your own datacenter is a safer choice and gives more control compared to a public cloud. Nobody ever got fired by placing workloads in their own data center, it’s a safe bet.
  • Instant compliance for international and industry-specific compliance standards by placing your workloads on Azure or Azure Stack services.
  • Out the box auditing trail for the complete stack conforming to Hipaa, PCI, Fedramp and more.
  • Very powerful reseller model. Delegated (downstream) providers enable resellers to offer your Azure Stack services to their customers.
  • Ability to choose for a shared or closed dedicated environment. Azure Stack in the Hosted Shared Cloud (Provider subscription) versus Azure Stack infrastructure deployment in your own Private dedicated Cloud.
  • Create unique offers per region. Providing different services per region, mixing and matching the underlying resources and associated performance. Tailored to your customer or business.
  • Monetize Azure Stack using chargeback data generated by the customizable billing meters. Bill customers or internal departments.
  • Deliver additional services, build your catalog through the marketplace using a custom resource provider or existing ISV marketplace content from Azure.
  • Provide your own unique intellectual property (IP) and SLA’s with your offers. Buildy your own IP in the solutions itself with RP’s and marketplace items but also around the integrated hardware solution in your own datacenter.
  • Provide customers or internal organization with one transparent bill for their cloud consumption in Azure and Azure Stack.
  • Benefit from Power BI ‘Business Intelligence’ data based on Azure Stack offers, subscription, resources, services and platform usage. Find out how your application is behaving, how customers use their subscriptions and how you can improve your offerings.
  • Connect your commerce and backoffice system to Azure Stack API’s. Generate valuable data and orchestrate provisioning.
  • Control and reduce shadow IT Developers already adopting Azure or doing shadow IT elsewhere can now 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.
  • Enable and onboard new customers otherwise restricted to their older traditional IT model. Offer them a stepping stone to a local Cloud model when public is one step to far.
  • Monitor and track usage through the portal or API’s in one uniform way across clouds, analyze the data and enhance your application or product offering with it.
  • Pricing and licensing using a pay-per-use model (CSP) or with a capacity model based upon the number of cores in the system.
  • Support is being worked out but it will be a joint venture with Microsoft and OEM partners.

Hybrid

  • Extend your environment to Azure or to other Azure Stacks in a different rack, room, datacenter, city, country or continent!
  • Hyper-Scale to Azure when you need more capacity in case of an event. Only pay for the resources used, no capital costs.
  • Cross premises and stack to stack connectivity with site-to-site VPN.
  • Connect your existing Azure Pack (WAP) environment with the WAP connector and manage WAP IaaS through Azure Stack.
  • Create true Hybrid cloud apps by using load-balancing across two locations.
  • Geo-graphical benefits. Host compute frontends in Azure in multiple regions, host backend data locally in Azure Stack.
  • Use and mix storage, compute and network capacity where it makes sense.
  • Hybrid identity with Azure AD and on-premise AD.
  • 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.
  • Azure Stack as a mobile datacenter at a F1 team, remote oil rigs, hospitals, factories, ships and airplanes. They all need disconnected scenarios and are able to sync with public or other clouds when connected.
  • 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 complying with company policies.
  • Dev-test in Azure Stack or on the free one-node PoC and publish into production on Azure or Azure Stack.
  • Applications and solutions developed on Azure can easily be relocated in another location than the public cloud. It provides an insurance policy for companies embracing public cloud but don’t want to be stuck there.
  • Use storage accounts to provide file storage via a file share or blob endpoint over HTTPS.
  • ISV develops marketplace or app solution that spans Azure and Azure Stack. For example, a LB solution from KEMP, Docker Datacenter, Cloud Foundry or any virtual network appliance solution.
  • Hybrid monitoring of Azure and Azure Stack assets with OMS from multiple Azure regions.

Consistency

  • Consistent portal experience and developer/admin tools for every (Mac OS X/Linux/Windows) platform.
  • 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.
  • Infrastructure or application deployment templates for any environment, no matter where you run your test, staging or production environment.
  • RBAC, usage and audit capabilities are standardized across all cloud services and work the same way.
  • 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.
  • AzureAD as shared identity provider for Azure Stack and Azure.

Infrastructure

  • Pick your own vendor and the SKU they offer, for instance, choose beefy CPU’s and speedy NVME disks.
  • Oversubscribing is under your control. It allows you to choose the hardware components and determine their performance and how that translates to the storage and compute resources you provide to your tenants.
  • Ability to choose for a dedicated Azure Stack infrastructure, your own secure Azure environment without any other tenants.
  • Design your network setup, align the tor switches and your own aggregated switches with your network.
  • The network is local to you, no fee for network traffic, low latency, great performance.
  • Use Express Route (after GA) for a dedicated high-performance and secure connection to Azure, traffic doesn’t go through the Internet.
  • Benefit from the new super-fast ‘storage spaces direct‘ SDS solution (VSAN equivalent) using ReFS. It allows you to create your own mix of higher capacity and faster physical local to the server.
  • Instant resource expansion by adding physical servers to the Azure Stack scale unit (cluster). Retire/remove servers from the scale unit the same way.
  • Expand the Azure Stack environment to other regions (data centers) by connecting racks with each other (after GA).
  •  Out of the box infrastructure and capacity lifecycle management in the portal.
  • APIs to integrate monitoring and usage functionality into your existing datacenter toolsets.
  • You are able to start small with only 4 servers at GA.

Functionalities

  • Hyper-converged solution using software-defined networking and storage along with compute in Windows Server 2016.
  • Battle-hardened Azure-inspired software-defined networking stack (incl. network controller, software load balancer, distributed firewall).
  • 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).
  • Storage Spaces Direct technologies brought by Windows Server (distributed design, industry standard disks).
  • Benefit from Infrastructure as Code (IaC), deploy or export your environment as code.
  • Native Visual Studio integration.
  • Use cross platform development tools, incl.  Azure CLI (any OS) , PowerShell,  Visual Studio
  • Support for Linux, Java, node.js, and PHP
  • Curated Azure Resource Manager templates for SharePoint, SQL Server, Active Directory. Curated gallery images for Windows Server and Linux.
  • Syndication of Azure Marketplace images for Azure Stack (syndicateable images include: LAMP stack, CoreOS Linux, SLES 12, Windows Server 2016 with Containers, SaltStack Enterprise)
  • 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.
  • Curated, orchestrated updates across the full stack (BIOS, firmware, drives, OS, infrastructure management software, Azure services)
  • Continuous innovation, falls in line with release cycles in Azure, newest services and pre-validated non-disruptive software and hardware updates at cloud cadence. Update entire stack with one single button.
  • Monitoring, health status and resource consumption overview through portal and API.
  • Differentiate your Stack with unique IP/solutions using marketplace items or ARM templates
  • Use existing community made quickstart ARM templates from GitHub to rollout your environment and get to know ARM.
  • Reusable and customizable ARM templates.Template compatibility between Azure and Azure Stack. Unified Azure SDK.
  • Deploy Windows and Linux workloads from open source repository and/or Visual Studio.
  • No disruption to tenant availability or experience, unlike Azure, Azure Stack is using live migration, no more VM downtime scheduling.
  • Provides MySQL and SQL DB as a service.
  • Use new Web apps, Mobile apps, 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.
  • Role-based access control with Azure Active Directory and Azure Resource Manager
  • Use Azure AD or Active Directory with ADFS as your identity source.
  • Additional Azure services such as Service Bus, Azure Backup service supplementing core IaaS and PaaS services will over time come with Azure Stack.
  • Make use of multiple fault domains/scale units (clusters) in one region.
  • Manage configuration drift with VM extensions  (example: DSC/PowerShell)
  • Leverage OMS, DSC, Docker and custom script VM extensions as a method for deploying software and configuration in an automated way into your VM’s.
  • VM Self-service diagnostics; VM redeployment, Serial Output, screen capture, VM local user password reset.
  • Manage application  secrets with Key Vault
  • Central management of capacity and resource consumption. Rack resource usage by region. Reclaim unused  storage resources , Recover deleted storage accounts.
  • Monitor Azure Stack resource health from portal.
  • Enable Azure Stack health to be exposed in other monitoring tools (example: System Center, OMS, Nagios)
  • Integrate networking resources across sites using VPN Gateway and Express route.
  • Single identity (SSO) with Azure AD integration.

 

Workloads

  • IaaS: Deploy 3-tier app using Azure Resource Manager template
  • IaaS: Deploy container-based app on Linux or Windows Server
  • IaaS: Deploy a third-party marketplace item solution (LB, CMS etc)
  • PaaS: Deploy a third-party marketplace item in AppService (WordPress, Umbraco, Drupal,Joomla etc)
  • IaaS/PaaS: Deploy Windows/Linux Containers (Kubernetes/DC/OS/Swarm) in Azure Container Service.
  • PaaS: Deploy web/mobile/api application in AppService
  • PaaS: Deploy a microservice application in Service Fabric
  • IaaS: Deploy Linux CoreOS container platform, CentOS,Debian,Oracle, Red Hat, Sles & openSuse and Ubuntu.
  • IaaS: Deploy Bitnami Drupal,Gitlab,LAMP Stack, Magento,Moodle,Nginx,OwnCloud,Redmine,Ruby
  • IaaS: Deploy SharePoint farm (IaaS)
  • IaaS: Deploy RDS farm (IaaS)
  • IaaS: Deploy SQL Server (IaaS)
  • IaaS: Deploy Active Directory domain from template (IaaS)
  • IaaS: Deploy Exchange from template with DSC (IaaS)

 

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