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

I can haz my own cloud

[Osgeld]

I shall keep it in a jar and call it betty

Local cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Also known as a regular server.

Re:Local cloud

[Tablizer]

Also known as a regular server.

But it has synergized separation of cloud docker containers so you can de-synchronize when your docker containers need decontained hypervisors re-docked and revirtualized. And, you can blockchain your deep-learning for an ambient UX experience.

In other words, it's buzzwordified so they can charge more.

My local cloud:

[DogDude]

Right click folder.
Click "share".

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.

Vuja De

[Tablizer]

1981: "It's a PC, it's like a mainframe on your desktop."

1995: "It's an Application Server, it's like a PC on a mainframe."

2011: "Cloud: it's like an Application Server on a mainframe."

2017: "Local Cloud: it's like a mainframe on your Application Server."

2025: "It's a Metatizer, it's like an X on a Y, where YOU define what an X and Y is. Good luck figuring it out; we can't. Oh, and thanks for the check!"

Re:The year of Linux on the desktop

[cayenne8]

At this point Linux servers are mostly for small blogs and criminal organizations.

Hmm..I dunno what rock you live under, but most any server room I've worked in for the past few decades, is about 99% Linux...with only the token windows server in the mix here and there.

That was mostly Federal systems....

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.

Re:What exactly makes a private cloud different fr

[Nkwe]

A real cloud solution is much more then just running a single virtual machine in someone else's data center. With a real cloud solution you specify to your cloud provider the workload you want to run along with your performance and availability requirements. The cloud provider then provisions and manages whatever hardware is necessary to meet your requirements. Assuming that you have asked for (and paid for) redundancy, hardware failures are transparent to you as failing hardware is automatically detected and replaced for you. If you need more (or less performance) you can adjust your declared requirements and the cloud provider will either swap out your existing (potentially virtual) machines for larger or smaller ones (or add / remove machines from your pool); they will do this without you having to redeploy your workload, in some cases you can do this with no downtime.

Azure (and other cloud providers) don't just offer pure virtual machines, they also offer virtual components that you can use to build applications with. Components include storage (relational, non-relational tables, basic blob), communication (queues, message routing, load balancing), compute component hosting, web content component hosting, authentication services, etc. By developing a cloud based application, you can worry about your logic and architecture, and not have to worry about deploying and maintaining basic infrastructure services.

What exactly is a "private cloud" if not a server? What am I missing?

A private cloud (a real private cloud, not just a single server offering file storage over the Internet) is a set of management tools that takes a pool of hardware and offers it up as logical computing components that can be leveraged by application developers with the goal of being able to develop your applications against a generic model and leaving the hardware and resource allocation and maintenance to the cloud management software (which is typically operated by people other than your development staff.)

This makes no sense...

[mark-t]

To the best of my admittedly limited understanding of the matter, Azure is a cloud storage service that you pay for as you use.... this makes sense when you are using somebody else's resources (Microsoft's), but are we supposed to pay Microsoft now to use our own servers instead?

Then again, maybe it does make sense... but strikes me as so self-evidently pointless as to defy any sense of reason why Microsoft would expect people to pay for it.

Re:This makes no sense...

[tlhIngan]

To the best of my admittedly limited understanding of the matter, Azure is a cloud storage service that you pay for as you use.... this makes sense when you are using somebody else's resources (Microsoft's), but are we supposed to pay Microsoft now to use our own servers instead?

Then again, maybe it does make sense... but strikes me as so self-evidently pointless as to defy any sense of reason why Microsoft would expect people to pay for it.

Azure is a cloud service - storage, compute, etc. With this, they can host their own internal Azure cloud.

Why? Well, perhaps you have enough servers to run your applications normally, so you run it in house and not run up cloud service bills. But if you're coming to a peak period, you can ramp up and deploy to Microsoft's servers, expanding your internal Azure "cloud" easily without modifying the software. Then when it settles down again, you can migrate back off from Microsoft's servers and back top internal hosting, saving time and money.

And since you've deployed to Azure internally, Microsoft captures you as a client for their services. What? You think you're going to develop for Azure and deploy to AWS?

We called it On-Premises-as-a-Service, or OPaaS

[kriston]

We called it On-Premises-as-a-Service, or OPaaS.

I shih tsu you not.

Even older news: Azure Pack

[cshay]

https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...

This private Azure technology been around for 4 years. MS deprecated their Web Farm Framework in favor of it.