Avanade announces new Microsoft Azure Stack solution

Last Tuesday Avanade announced the new Avanade Azure Stack Solution. Avanade delivers this solution from client site, at remote locations or hosted in Avanade’s own datacenters. Azure Stack is an extension of Azure to on-premises locations. People tend to forget that Azure Stack is not just a replacement of your physical servers running a hypervisor like Hyper-V. It’s a true hybrid cloud solution. You get features like Disaster Recovery with instant fail-over, Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities, Load Balancing, the new Portal experience and so on. I’m really excited to tell you more about this great solution. What makes Azure Stack such an interesting solution?

• With Azure Stack, you get consistency across public and private cloud. This means you can develop applications in Azure or Azure Stack with no code changes needed. When people understand Azure, they also understand Azure Stack. No extra knowledge needed.
• If you want to move from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Platform as a Service (PaaS) and use this in your own datacenter. Imagine you can just request an on-premises SQL database from a portal without having to install, configure and manage SQL Server!
• When you have locations without internet access or with high latency connections.
• When you have data that cannot be stored in the Azure Cloud and you still want to use the power of Azure.
• When you are a reseller that wants to deliver a rock solid platform to your users.
• When your company is not ready to move to the cloud. You can use Azure Stack as a stepping stone to Azure.
• When you are already using Azure Pack. You can connect Azure Stack to Azure Pack with the WAP Connector.
• You can start very small with a couple of nodes and slowly migrate to Azure Stack to spread costs. There is no need to completely replace a datacenter at once.

This all sounds great. What’s the catch? I’m really wondering how fast Microsoft is able to close the gap between Azure and Azure Stack. Not all features in Azure are currently available in Azure Stack, so make sure that the features you want to use in Azure Stack are available during Global Availability (GA). Since last year I’ve been involved with our internal teams to test the platform and demonstrate this new technology to our Avanade Netherlands Infrastructure team. At Avanade, we have a dedicated Azure Stack environment for demos or a PoC. To learn more, send an email to [email protected] or contact me. Disclaimer: Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.