It’s hard to believe, but it’s been a whole year since we officially launched Azure Stack! Our customers have been with us through the journey this past year providing great feedback, and we’ve been listening. Last year at Ignite was a huge milestone for our customers who consider Azure Stack a part of their core cloud strategy as they move faster than ever. Azure Stack changed the game for our customers, allowing them to leverage the benefits of a consistent hybrid cloud and innovate at a rapid pace.
At this year’s Ignite conference, there is so much to be excited about. Customer interest and adoption of Azure Stack is high, with customers already capturing business value from its unparalleled capabilities.
I’m delighted to share more today and throughout the week at Ignite about the innovative capabilities we continue to bring to Azure Stack, all to provide value to our customers and partners so they can do more.
New innovation and Azure services coming to Azure Stack
IoT and Edge
Microsoft offers one of the most comprehensive end-to-end IoT solution platforms in the industry, from Azure Sphere, to Azure IoT Hub, and Azure IoT Central. Our solution portfolio has resonated well with customers and many have asked when they can expect to see IoT services on Azure Stack, given the hybrid and edge computing capabilities offered by Azure Stack.
Today, I am excited to announce that both Azure IoT Hub and Azure Event Hub services will be in private preview on Azure Stack by calendar year Q4 2018.
Blockchain
With accelerated market demand and expanded use cases for block chain technology, like establishing trust on complex supply chains, provenance attestation of products, and documenting financial transactions for stability and resilience of markets, we released the Ethereum block chain solution template that allow customers to quickly deploy an Ethereum block chain solution on Azure Stack.
Managed Disks and more!
Since the launch of Azure Managed Disks, we’ve seen tremendous customer adoption for the service on Azure, and heard from our customers that they really like this service and would like to see it offered on Azure Stack. I’m happy to announce that this capability has been made available in our latest 1808 update.
We heard our customers loud and clear, and I’m happy to share a new wave of Azure services becoming available on Azure Stack, based directly on their feedback.
- Azure Monitor is now available on Azure Stack and provides base-level infrastructure metrics and logs for most services.
- Templatized Azure Service Fabric service is generally available on Azure Stack.
- Kubernetes on Azure Stack is now in public preview. You can install Kubernetes using Azure Resource Manager templates generated by the ACS-Engine on Azure Stack. For details, please check out the Deploy a Kubernetes cluster to Azure Stack documentation.
Finally, we’re extending Azure services to help our customers also manage Azure Stack resources. We are announcing general availability of Azure Site Recovery (ASR) support for Azure Stack. Customers can use ASR to protect their Azure Stack tenant resources to Azure, allowing customers to benefit from the scale and geographic distribution of Azure datacenter for their Azure Stack disaster recovery plans.
Similarly, Azure Update & Configuration Management of VMs running on Azure Stack is now available. From Azure, customers can schedule updates and track changes for both Azure and Azure Stack VMs to maintain a consistent policy. This capability is available today through marketplace syndication.
Improving the developer experience on Azure Stack
In May, we announced the release of the first round of hybrid cloud application solutions. Our customers have also told us that they love the Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions from Microsoft and would like to see how they can bring them to the cloud edge, closer to the data source. I’m happy to announce that the second set of Hybrid Application Patterns, covering Edge AI, Tiered Data Analytics, and Geo Distributed Applications, is available today and you can see the details on our solution page.
To assist developers to build applications on Azure Stack, we continue to make investments around various developer tools and Frameworks including:
- New Terraform providers that enable Kubernetes deployments.
- .NET and Java SDKs with API Profile support.
- New API Profile release: 2018-03-01-Hybrid.
- Continued updates to API version support (CRP, SRP, and NRP).
- QuickStart templates and scripts that showcase Hybrid Patterns (Hadoop, Block Chain, and Sample Cloud Scale Application template).
- High-available VM images from Bitnami in the Azure Stack Marketplace like Hadoop, MySQL, and others.
Azure Stack infrastructure management
Support for larger scale
With our 1807 release, we’ve added the capability that lets our customers add additional physical server(s) into their existing Azure Stack solution, allowing users to grow their Azure Stack deployments in step with their needs. You can reach out to the hardware partner of your choice for more information.
Customers have also asked us for more capacity in their systems, and we are happy to announce that we are expanding the maximum scale of Azure Stack systems up to 16 physical servers per Azure Stack Scale Unit, and this is available through all our hardware partners now. In addition, we’re actively working to enable our customers to add additional Scale Unit(s) into an existing Azure Stack region.
Security
Security is a key pillar for Microsoft’s cloud strategy. From Azure to Azure Stack, we continue making investments to expand our and our partner’s security solutions to provide our customers more choices and options in securing their cloud assets and infrastructures.
I’m excited to share that our syslog client is generally available now to support Syslog Information Event Management (SIEM) integration.
In addition, we’ve worked with Qualys to provide vulnerability scanning reports and compliance with DISA STIG and other standards for the Azure Stack infrastructure.
Backing up your application’s secrets on an external Hardware Secure Module (HSM) will soon be available via the Azure Stack marketplace solution CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager (CCKM) by Thales, which allows you to interface an HSM with your Key Vault running on Azure Stack.
See you at Ignite
We prepared a great set of sessions along with a pre-day event at Ignite this year. I’ll be giving a talk on Azure Stack’s state of business and roadmap on Tuesday at Ignite. Thank you for being part of the Azure Stack journey, and I look forward to meeting you and hearing how we can help accelerate your hybrid cloud journey in Orlando!
As always, thank you for your continued feedback and support for Azure Stack. We love hearing from you, so please continue to share with us your thoughts or questions in our User Voice community.
Natalia Mackevicius
General Manager, Azure Stack