Microsoft To Offer Local Version of Azure Cloud Service (reuters.com)

Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new service that allows customers to use its cloud technology on their own servers, part of the company's efforts to refocus its product line to compete more effectively with rivals Amazon and Google. From a report: "One of the key differentiations we have with Azure versus our two biggest competitors in the cloud platform space is our ability to support true hybrid solutions," Judson Althoff, Microsoft's executive vice president of worldwide commercial business, told Reuters. Microsoft is hoping to carve a niche among customers who cannot or do not want to have to move all their computing operations to the massive shared data centers that are collectively known as the cloud. Azure Stack could serve companies in highly regulated industries or in parts of the world where using the cloud is not yet feasible, Althoff said.

Comments

Makes Sense, Really

[EndlessNameless]

Azure offers a lot of features that are not available in Windows clustering. It can appeal to enterprises that want highly available services without dependency on internet or hosted storage.

On Microsoft's side, this product is just repackaging and selling code that is 99% the same as what they run internally, so it has a lot of potential and relatively little cost.

Between this and VMware supporting Linux containers natively, mid-tier and smaller enterprises are getting a lot of new options thrown at them.

Re:What exactly makes a private cloud different fr

[darkain]

On-demand scalability of local resources. You have 100x servers running a collection of VMs that can scale up and down across these servers as demands change for each application. One particular module starts to get hit hard, that app can spawn more instances across your local cluster, and possibly also downscale lesser used apps to give it more resources.

This is essentially what Docker or VMWare is, but for the Microsoft world.