Azure stack summary
Today I watched Ultan Kinahan (from Microsoft Global Black Belt Consulting team) presentation on Azure Stack.
Short summary: it blew my mind
It reminded me how powerful Microsoft really is. And how advanced things are. And that not many competitors have resources or capacity to build cool stuff like this.
Before today, I had no idea you can run Azure on premises.
Yep. Say you have a requirement that data can never leave the premises. But you want to take advantage of all the coolness from Azure. Well now you can!
Below are some of the random notes I scribbled while listening to the presentation.
Azure Stack is an extension of Azure which you can run on-premises
- There are 50 Azure regions
- Azure services are available on-premises. There are a lot of services that are in development, but just haven’t been announced yet.
- Data Lake – 10,000 servers
- Smallest services is Azure backup takes 38 servers to run. It’s changing to 12 servers soon.
- Moving container services to Kubernetes – is this a new way to do containers??
Azure Stack has its own marketplace. Each partner that gets accepted agrees to support their offering in regular Azure and in Azure Stack (on-premises)
Use Azure Stack for
- Latency
- Connectivity
- Local data processing
Azure Stack use cases
- Military
- Planes
- Submarines
- Oil rigs
- On the back of Humvees for military
- Space & SpaceX
Regulations to consider
- Government
- Industry
- Region
You can deploy Azure Stack in two ways
- Connected to internet
- Disconnected – never connected to anything. You can run this completely disconnected from anything in the world
Azure Stack competitors
- AWS is dabbling with something similar. The AWS competing product is GreenGrass. However, it’s going to be pretty hard for them, because they don’t own the software products it takes to run this end to end.
- Google doesn’t have any competing offers for on-premises.
- IBM doesn’t either – and they don’t know what they have to begin with.
Google is much better spot to compete with something like this. - Azure.com – is the single source of truth.
Differences between Azure and Azure Stack
- Endpoints
- API versions (most will never be same)
- Capabilities (adding a lot more scale, storage, services, etc)
- Content (marketplace, a lot of stuff in the pipeline)
Which to developers means: you now have to deploy to two end-points. There are customers that already have 14 different Azure Stacks.
- Azure Stack Policy Pack – you can apply to your Azure subscription (it sounds like it’s easier to spin up a new subscription vs. fixing an existing one?)
- Right now they test on all OEM kits, before the new service goes live?
Two ways to purchase Azure Stack
- System you manage
- Managed service
The cheapest Azure Stack you can get today is a 4 node one. It will cost between $150K to $400K. 12 node – goes for up to $1MM.
You can not re-purpose any hardware you have today for Azure Stack, because things inside are very specialized. Almost like appliance.
Support is integrated into MS. When needed goes to OEMs.
Hardware pieces of a single Azure Stack unit (this is called Scale Unit)
- Redundant power supply
- Switches (40GnE
- Management switch
- Hardware Lifecycle Host (HLH) – monitoring, alerting, updates
- The rest are servers: 4 servers minimum. 16 max. All servers are EXACTLY same
- The unit is optimized for specific purpose
- LRS – Local Redundant Storage
Managing a customer network is challenging.
Partners that can build Azure Stack units today
- Cisco
- DELL EMC
- Lenovo
- Huawei
- HP
- Wortmann AG
As an example, it took 20 minutes to deploy 80 VM, and 28min on Azure Stack for a recent customer. In comparison it used to take about 6 weeks for that customer to spin up that many machines before.
When to use what?
- Azure with Policy
- Azure Stack Development Kit – to update you have to completely burn and re-deploy basically
- Azure Stack OEM Solution
Summary
What it’s for
- First consistent Hybrid Cloud Platform
- Integrated system with Iaas and PaaS
- Regularly updated to Azure-consistency
- Truly open and flexible (just like Azure)
What it’s not for
- Basic Virtualization-replacement solution
- DYI infrastructure
- Static system you deploy and forget
- .NET/Win only
Mark’s questions / thoughts
- As the admin you will now change roles: you will have to guard the capacity of the box.
Admin sets Quotas. - One nice feature, is you can price services out to and then charge your internal users.
- Azure Stack Pricing
- SQL/MySQL is just a connector
- Currently working on designing how to deploy SQL Server
- They are now modeling how they are going to bring in SQL Server into Azure Stack
- Can sysadmin be able to RDP to a certain Server – the answer is no. Each server is on Win Core.
- How do you get a test box to play around with? Because it seems that after you buy this, you’re going to want to test things out. And not necessarily on your prod Azure Stack.
- Licensing – didn’t understand how things are priced if you want to install SQL Server on Azure Stack. Is the license extra, or the same??
- Azure Stack reminded me what the mainframes were. It seems a bit like a BetterServer or Server v2. Now – it’s a closet with a ton of hardware. Expensive. Big. Heavy. Only big customers can afford it.
- You have to agree – mainframes have some similarities. But if this offering gets popular, then the price, weight, and size will start to shrink.
- And Azure Stack can easily become a new type of “server v2” where parts are redundant, plugged into the cloud. If you think about it, the way a server should be… if you were building one from scratch today.
