Microsoft Azure Stack - An Overview and Comparison with Azure Public Cloud

Highly regulated enterprise sectors like Federal, Healthcare, Finance etc has got restrictions to migrate their IT resources into the public cloud. The restriction denies these companies to leverage some of the benefits of the cloud computing. Enterprises expects the cloud providers to transform their existing IT Infrastructure on par with the public cloud but with in their own data center.

Microsoft recently released a technical preview of product named "Azure Stack" which brings Azure Services directly to the Enterprise Data center. According to Microsoft "Organizations can create these Azure services from data center resources - enabling developers and IT  professionals to quickly provision and scale services using the same self-service experience found in Azure. The  product also allows IT organizations to leverage the same management and automation tools used with Azure to  customize the service delivery experience to the business units they serve." Microsoft already has a product named "Azure Pack" which brings the public cloud experience to the Data center along with a converged infrastructure solution called "Cloud Platform System (CPS)".

The main difference between the Azure Pack and Azure Stack is that the Azure pack is built on top of the Windows Server and System Center along with a layer of technology to simulate the azure experience (Example : Self Provisioning of VMs, Databases, Websites). Azure Stack is a product designed to create and offer azure services to the users from the data center.


Lets compare the features in the Azure Stack (General Availability) with the Azure Public Cloud.

Features	Azure Public Cloud	Azure Stack
Compute	Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, Service Fabric, Batch,  Remote App, Azure Container Service	Service Fabric,  Virtual Machine,  Containers
Web and Mobile	App Service, Web Apps, Mobile Apps, API Apps, Logic Apps, API Management, Notification Hubs, Mobile Engagement	Web Apps, API Apps, Mobile Apps, Logic Apps
Storage and Backup	Storage Blobs and Files, Backup, Import/Export, Site Recovery, Stor Simple	Blob Storage, Premium Storage
Data	SQL Database,  Document DB, Redis Cache, Search, Tables, SQL Data Warehouse	Tables
Security and Management	Automation, Portal, Key Vault,  Active Directory, Multi factor Authentication, Store/Marketplace, VM Image Gallery and VM Depot	Portal, Key Vault, VM Image Gallery and VM Depot
Developer Services	Visual Studio, Application Insights, Azure SDK, Team Project	Azure SDK
Networking	Virtual Network, Load Balancer, DNS, Express Route, Traffic Manager, VPN Gateway, Application Gateway	Virtual Network, Load Balancer, VPN Gateway

In addition Azure Public cloud has got provisioned features for Analytics, IoT and Hybrid which is not available in the Azure Stack.

Azure Stack is in the technical preview now and the general availability is expected on early 2017.