As mentioned yesterday I promised to write a series of follow up posts about my ‘Running Azure on your laptop’ session. I’ll use this post as a placeholder to point to the different parts.
Microsoft is more and more embracing a hybrid cloud approach. As part of this evolution, an increasing amount of ‘Azure only’ services become available outside Azure. This idea is not new, people who work long enough in the Microsoft ecosystem maybe remember Azure Pack, which was a way to install Azure software on your own hardware.It gave you the Azure portal and some of it’s services. I never tried it myself and I don’t know any customer who used it in the wild.
A couple of years later, Microsoft announced the Azure Pack’s successor, Azure Stack. This was a hardware appliance, that you could install in your own datacenter. Over time, the name evolved to Azure Stack Portfolio as multiple flavors of Azure Stack became available. Azure Stack is still available today and keeps evolving.
At Ignite 2019, another solution was introduced; Azure Arc. With Azure Arc, Microsoft hybrid story continues by allowing you to manage resources from within Azure while they can be running practically anywhere.
Azure Arc supports managing & operating Virtual Machines, SQL servers, and Kubernetes clusters that run on any cloud provider, hybrid scenario, or on-premises infrastructure that is fully managed through Microsoft Azure.
If you want to learn more about Microsoft hybrid cloud story, check https://azure.com/hybrid.
I’ll write multiple posts but I’ll make sure to update this post with the full list.