Azure Stack has many of the same features in Azure, but Microsoft’s plan to create a winning hybrid cloud is as hardware-centric as it is software-powered
Azure Stack, Microsoft’s private cloud software built from the same bits used to create the public Azure cloud service, is now available in its third, and likely final, technical preview edition before being released to the public later this year.
TP3 has many new features, but it also clarifies Azure Stack’s pricing structure, and how Microsoft is addressing the specific problems customers are using Azure Stack for.
Azure Stack’s concept is audacious: Help people run a private or hybrid cloud on their own hardware that’s functionally identical to the full-blown Microsoft Azure cloud, down to the APIs and the bits themselves.
To that end, most of TP3’s new functionality replicates what’s in Azure at large, including Azure Functions , Microsoft’s stab at an Amazon Lambda-style serverless application architecture. Apache Mesos, a data center orchestration system used by many Azure customers , will also now run on Azure Stack.
But the big revelation is Azure Stack’s business model. Mike Neil, Microsoft corporate vice president, explained in a phone call that Microsoft customers wanted as consistent an experience as possible between Azure Stack and Azure itself — “from an API perspective and a services perspective, but also from a business perspective,” he said.
“Azure Stack will be priced in a similar fashion to Azure,” said Neil. “We use a set of meters that mirror what you have in the public cloud. Obviously, the pricing on that will be lower, given that the customer owns the hardware and that it’s running in their facility. ” Aside from the consistency of cost between the two environments, “there’s no upfront cost,” said Neil. “It’s really based on their usage. ” The meters are “similar to what you’d find in Azure,” such as running a certain size of VM for a certain length of time.
Several Microsoft OEM partners, such as Dell, HP Enterprise, and Lenovo, are intent on providing a pay-as-you-go model for Azure Stack certified hardware.
