Applications and the choice of Cloud Infrastructure

The path to a hybrid cloud for customers is often evolutionary impacting applications, security, infrastructure and the operating model.  Of late, many of our customers have been struggling with the choice between Azure Stack and an Azure Pack with Windows Server based on-prem cloud. With Azure Stack clearly being the  Azure-like cloud on-prem, does it make

The path from Windows Server and Azure Pack to Azure Stack is further along that evolutionary path, with new demands on applications and changes in management and solution architectures. Preparing for the journey and starting on the right path are the key steps to success in hybrid cloud.

With applications (cows vs pets), you begin by rationalizing your virtualized applications, VMs or mulit-tier apps. Examples like web applications, Business Application, SQL, Exchange and other Microsoft or Linux VMs.  These arer often your pets characterized by consumption based on reserved capacity, scale up architectures, heavy maintenance (high availability, DR strategies, maintenance activities like P&U). Today, a majority of enterprise applications (%?) fall in this category and are the first to move to a Azure Pack and Windows Server based hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Cows on the other hand, are a growing set of applications developed by Software teams within companies based on cloud native principles, platforms and tooling. These applications are characterized by on-demand capacity consumption, scale out, api driven, low maintenance immutable services(as an example you don’t patch or reconfigure a service, you destroy and deploy a new updated instance). Sometimes also called “cloud native”, these applications are increasing built on PaaS services like Service fabric, IoT, DBaaS with tools like Visual Studio providing the continuous delivery on platforms like Azure and Azure Stack.

Azure- like experience -on-prem with Azure Pack and Windows Server

If your applications are mostly pets, Azure Pack provides the IaaS capabilities to migrate your pets yet benefit from the Cloud Infrastructure and operating model. It is built on proven and well-understood technologies like Windows Azure Pack, System Center and Windows Server, integrating well with your existing datacenter investments while providing you a path to the cloud at lower cost, complexity and risk. 

Azure consistency on-prem with Azure Stack

If your applications are mostly cows, you are either already building\running applications on the public cloud and looking to bring them (or some) on-prem. With these applications, Azure Stack provides you with the services (Eg: service fabric, IoT, DBaaS) and developer tooling (Azure SDK, Visual Studio) to be able to build cloud native application and take advantage of the Azure consistency to either scale or run particular applications and services in a Hybrid model. With Azure consistency, you get the same architecture and components that powers Azure with the ability to develop and deliver applications that run either on-prem or on Azure seamlessly. As a result, the underlying cloud infrastructure introduces new technologies like nano server (and a new Infrastructure Management tooling), Resource providers, Azure Resource Manager with a truly hyper-scale architecture. As a result you have to retool your organization that might otherwise be operating technologies like System Center and Windows Server.

A  summary of the positioning between the two

As applications evolve, most customers will start with predominantly pets, but over time acquire a healthy mix of pets and cattle. As a service providers delivering  on customer requests that could fall in either category, having the choice of both infrastructure platforms will optimize cost, complexity and risk while providing the right service to meet your customers needs.