Microsoft unveils Azure Stack to bring hyperscale cloud capability to companies’ data centers

Microsoft today announced at its enterprise-oriented Ignite conference new software called Azure Stack, which offers Microsoft’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) cloud technologies for companies’ existing on-premises data centers.

Azure Stack includes Microsoft’s newly announced Azure Service Fabric PaaS software for building and running cloud applications constructed out of adjustable pieces called microservices, as well as the Azure Portal and the Azure Resource Manager with templates for deploying data center resources.

“We’re the only major [cloud] vendor that’s taking our hyperscale public cloud technologies and bringing that to our customers for their data centers,” Mike Schutz, general manager of product marketing at Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, told VentureBeat in an interview.

That might sound like bragging, but it’s pretty much on point. Market-leading cloud provider Amazon Web Services has not done much to handle workloads in on-premises data centers. Neither has Google. Microsoft is taking advantage of that fact.

If anything, this sort of release should catch the attention of VMware, which has a public cloud as well as software for managing clouds in companies’ on-premises data centers. VMware in recent years has launched software-defined networking and software-defined storage services, and Azure Stack comes with implementations of those technologies as well.

A preview of Azure Stack will become available this summer.

Read Microsoft’s blog post on the news to learn more about Azure Stack.