Understanding Microsoft Azure Stack
I previously said that Windows Azure Pack was not really Azure. It had a portal that
looked like the Azure classic portal, but its plumbing was completely different and did
not offer services in a consistent manner with Azure. Microsoft Azure Stack is
something completely different. This brand-new product brings Azure-consistent
services on premises by using Azure code. This means that for the services available in
Azure Stack (because not every Azure service is available in Azure Stack), they will be
usable in a consistent manner:
If a JSON template is created to deploy services in Azure, it will also work on
premises against Azure Stack.
If an application is written on ARM, it will work in Azure and in Azure Stack.
Applications using Azure Storage APIs will function the same way.
AzureRM PowerShell will work with on-premises subscriptions through Azure
Stack and subscriptions in the public Azure cloud.Microsoft Azure Stack does not utilize System Center because Azure does not use
System Center. Instead, Azure has its own fabric management around storage,
networking, and compute that is being translated to function on premises at a much
smaller scale with Azure Stack. Consider that Azure operates millions of nodes with
storage accounts spanning a thousand nodes across thousands of disks. This is very
different from what will be available on premises with Azure Stack in even the largest
enterprises. Therefore, the fabric implementation will be different in some ways
between Azure Stack and Azure, especially in the way that storage works. The key
point, however, is that the management framework that interfaces with the fabric
elements and the services built on that framework will operate and be managed in the
same way, giving a consistent end-user experience.
Many of the new technologies in Windows Server 2016 were inspired by Azure and
utilized much of the engineering work already performed in Azure that was built on
Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V. Key new technologies include the following:
Software Defined Networking v2 with the Network Controller and various Network
Functions, such as the Software Load Balancer and Multi-Tenant Gateway
Storage Spaces Direct, which enables disks local to the nodes in a cluster to be
aggregated and utilized as clustered storage that is resilient to disk or node failure
Service Fabric that enables multiple instances of services to replicate
synchronously to offer a highly available and scalable service
Hyper-V advances such as Discrete Device Assignment and Shielded VMs
Nano Server, which has a small footprint, provisions fast, and uses the Current
Branch for Business (CBB) servicing model, enabling feature updates throughout