On January 29th, Azure Stack went into Technical Preview.
Update July 14th 2017: Azure Stack is now generally available.
Having discussed Azure Stack with several of my customers in the past weeks, I’ve come to the following list of potential use cases for it (in no particular order):
- Private cloud environment (duh!): Host your own private cloud with (more-or-less) the same capabilities as the Microsoft Public Azure Cloud. You can maybe even organize visits to your cloud data centers 🙂
- On-ramp to public cloud: Gently try Azure in your own private environment before you migrate (parts of your) solutions to the public cloud without having to re-architect!.
- Capex development & test environment: At fixed capex cost, give your development team an environment in which they can code and test. Then deploy it to the public cloud (or private, or hybrid; whatever you want) without having to re-architect!
- Hybrid cloud: Create hybrid cloud solutions, based on the same Azure architecture. Use your private cloud part of the hybrid architecture for stuff you don’t want in the public cloud. Use public cloud for all stuff that can go there. Mix-and-match, without having to re-architect!
- Cloud bursting: Run things mainly in your private cloud, and use the public cloud to offload (parts of your) workloads to when there are (seasonal) peaks in your load.
- Exit strategy insurance: Have the comforting feeling and insurance that when you for some reason or the other don’t like using the Microsoft Public Azure Cloud anymore, you can just migrate your solutions back to your private cloud without having to re-architect!
Just my $0.02 of course.
Cheers, Gijs
indaField 