Azure Stack or Not Azure Stack That is the question?
Microsoft announced at Ignite in 2015 in Chicago a new Private Cloud Solution based on the Azure Experience.
The Microsoft Azure Stack main goal was to provide customers with an Azure like Solution hosted in their own Datacenters.
This solution answers many legal constraints linked to the Public Cloud:
- Data Privacy
- Data localization constraints
- Private Access
- Billing (Example in Europe as Microsoft Invoices come from Dublin)
- …
where is Azure Stack today? A new Technical Preview has been released a few months ago, but this new TP is still a Proof of Concept (PoC), using only one node, is not even a Beta version usable in a test environment. On top of that, the Azure Stack Team does not publically broadcasts any information about the exact release dates and the pricing.
This product seems to present a good opportunity to implement rapidly a Private Cloud and a real hybridation between a Private and a Public environment. One of the great benefits of Azure Stack is the user experience. Azure Stack proposes the same user experience as Azure (Public and Private Cloud) and this is very important if your company changes its work organization towards a DevOps initiative and uses the Infrastructure As Code methodology because the user experience will still be the same (Deployment using JSON templates, ARM, etc.).
Technically, Azure Stack offers a lot of interesting features but Azure's Public Cloud growth (+93% in Q2 2017 including Office365) will probably push Microsoft to re-evaluate the market interest of Azure Stack.
Two or Three years ago, customers were reluctant to use the Public Cloud for different reasons (Legal, knowledge, not mature enough, etc.). Therefore, Azure Stack was a good compromise between two extremes, classic hosting in company owned Datacenters and Public Cloud. The transformation and transition steps between this two worlds were too high for some companies and Azure Stack was a great opportunity to bring intermediate steps and reduce the gap.
However, during the last 2 years, the Azure Team worked hard on hybridation solutions - for example on Network with ExpressRoute, Monitoring with OMS and agent available on Azure or for your servers on-premises, Automation and so on-. Nowadays, the steps between a classic hosting solution and the Public Cloud seem less complex and a lot Microsoft's Partners help companies transition with their experience and Assets. Unfortunately, those elements could impact Azure Stack as a whole and its release date.
In Conclusion and in my opinion, the most important road blocks for companies to move to the Azure Public Cloud lie around legal reasons and the security (Data security). The other technical constraints could be mitigated more easily. For this two main show stoppers, Azure Stack stays a good solution to move all of the company's IT into the Cloud (Private and Public).
Matthieu ROSSI