Available Now: Technical Preview of Microsoft Azure Stack

The first Technical Preview of Microsoft Azure Stack, the only hybrid cloud platform that is consistent with a leading public cloud, is live today. Born from Azure, Azure Stack helps organizations deliver Azure services from their own datacenters.
With Azure Stack, organizations can embrace hybrid cloud computing on their terms by helping them address business and technical considerations like regulation, data sovereignty, customization and latency. Azure Stack enables that by giving businesses the freedom to decide where applications and workloads reside without being constrained by technology.
“Just like Azure, Azure Stack is a comprehensive platform for hosting modern business applications.  Azure and Azure Stack have a standardized architecture, including the same portal, a unified application model, and common DevOps tools,”  wrote Microsoft’s Mike Neil, Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Cloud. “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. Tooling-wise, developers can use Visual Studio, PowerShell, as well as other open-source DevOps tools thereby enabling the same end user experiences as in Azure.”
Through a series of Technical Previews, Microsoft will add services and content such as operating system images and Azure Resource Manager templates to help customers start taking advantage of Azure Stack. Azure has hundreds of these applications and components already on GitHub and as the corresponding services come to Azure Stack, users can take advantage of those as well.
Open source partners are already engaged. For example, Canonical is contributing validated Ubuntu Linux images that enable open source applications to work well in Azure Stack environments.
For more, check out the Azure Stack site and the below video. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Jose Miguel Parrella

José Miguel is an open source enthusiast and part of the Microsoft Azure team. For the last 10 years he has been developing enterprise-grade open source solutions for customers and partners in the Americas. He was a lead architect of Canaima 2.0 - the Venezuelan Linux distribution, a Debian Developer, published author and is a regular speaker in open source events across the world.

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