Dive Brief:
- Yesterday, Microsoft announced it will launch the first technical preview of its Azure Stack on January 29.
- The company is attempting to bring its Azure cloud computing services direclty into customer's data centers.
- The preview version is limited and will only support a single machine, though Microsoft plans to eventually offer a version designed for an enterprise-scale data center environment.
Dive Insight:
Azure Stack offers “the same portal, management, and devops tooling as the Azure cloud service,” according to a TechCrunch report. “If you’re expecting to regularly move some workloads between your own data center and Azure....having a single platform and only one set of APIs across your own data center and the cloud to work with greatly simplifies the process.”
Ryan O’Hara, Microsoft’s director of program management for enterprise cloud solutions, said the stack puts the company in a good position to compete against Google and Amazon Web Services because it more fluidly connects to customers' data centers.
O'Hara said he hopes to create a "one Azure ecosystem" that can span from the cloud to enterprise data centers, allowing developers and administrators to use one tool set to target the platform, TechCrunch reports.
Microsoft said it will continue to add new services and content over the course of the technical preview.
