The public cloud has quite a few players but the 2 which are market leaders are Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. The hybrid and private cloud models are gaining more and more popularity off late. This has open up the competition for all the players in the market.
Microsoft announced the first technical preview of Microsoft Azure Stack earlier this week. The blog post announcement states that the product “helps organizations deliver Azure services from their own datacenter.”
According to Mike Neil the VP of Enterprise cloud at microsoft – Azure subscriptions have crossed 100,000 every month. Regulatory concerns on completely moving to a public cloud platform remain.
Neil has stated 3 main reason to go for hybrid cloud at this juncture:
- Improved developer productivity – the application can be written and directly deployed on Azure/Azure stack
- A hybrid cloud strategy can be adopted by organizations, according to their own requirements
- Familiar tools and resources and be used by professionals to create cloud delivered products using Azure Stack
“The application model is based on Azure Resource Manager, which enables developers to take the same declarative approach to applications, regardless of whether they run on Azure or Azure Stack,” Neil said in the post.
“To ensure Azure consistency, we will update Azure Stack at a ‘cloud-cadence.’ Customers should expect multiple Azure Stack updates every year post initial release, and at any point in time they will have access to GA features as well as some preview features,” said Ryan O’Hara, partner director of program management at Microsoft.
O’Hara also said they expect the first release of Azure Stack to happen in Q4 of the 2016 calendar year, but there will be multiple technical previews throughout this year.
This comes as a natural move from Microsoft as the competition in the cloud platform is intensifying.
Microsoft is looking to deliver speed and innovation through the Azure Stack without constraints of location.
