Customer choice
Running your own cloud is always going to mean more work, and more costs than using public cloud, but some customers want that choice, Neil maintains. "We've heard very clearly from customers that they want to have the option to be able to run an on-premise environment. That is a conscious trade-off, moving away from a fully operated environment, where they don't have to take on the burden, with the elasticity that allows them to grow to very large-scale."
With private cloud, you can only scale up to the amount of hardware you have, but Neil expects OEMs to "get creative" about the way they sell cloud hardware. "Dell has a flexible payment mechanism that looks much more like a cloud subscription than the traditional acquisition of hardware."
The key benefit of Azure Stack is that you get a private cloud that's ready for hybrid cloud, that uses Azure services and scales out to public Azure when you want it to. "Our goal is not that everybody has isolated cloud, but that it is hybrid, that you have the option of using public cloud," Neil emphasises. "You can scale your applications into the public cloud if necessary and the assets, the applications and the artefacts you create, either in public cloud or private clouds, should be transferable between those environments."
That's going to work easily with Azure Stack, he claims, because the applications you're going to run on Azure Stack are built for cloud. "The challenge most people ran into trying to do cloud bursting was that they had inconsistent environments. They had an on-premise environment that looked more like a traditional data centre environment and they were trying to burst into a cloud environment and make the semantics of those two things work together.
"That's one of the goals of Azure Stack, to provide an environment that's syntactically the same, and that's semantically a close environment, so that customers can make that transition more easily."
Not the norm
That's possible today, but it's not yet common, Neil admits. "Even today we have customers in Azure that do a lot of cloud bursting; there are scenarios that do work, but it's probably not the norm – it's probably the edge case of usage."
What he hopes is that customers will grow from private cloud into hybrid cloud. "What we're hearing from the majority of customers today – and we think this changes over time as cloud becomes more widely adopted – but today, one of the advantages they see with Azure Stack is isolation. They want to have their own instance. What we're hearing is the value proposition is 'I want to run this in my own data centre and have control'.
"As their usage matures and they understand cloud technology both on-premise and public, that blending, that hybrid approach is going to become much more interesting – so that bursting and scale out to public cloud becomes very interesting for them."
Run your own public Azure
Azure Stack isn't Microsoft backing away from public cloud. Instead it's part of a continuum from public clouds to private clouds – and even third-party public clouds. At the high-end of the scale, Neil points out: "We have public Azure which is a global presence with large-scale data centres. We have a plan in general to bring that to certain markets as a more isolated environment."
Examples of that are the two data centres that Microsoft runs for the US government's version of Azure today, much like the version of AWS that Amazon runs for the CIA. Neil notes: "That provides us with an isolated environment with specific security and compliance credentials that is tailored for the US government. We have a similar instance in China and we also recently announced a similar approach in Germany, where a subsidiary of Deutsche Telecom will be the data steward of that service.
"At the very top-end, those are large-scale deployments that are targeted towards relatively good-sized markets. Azure Stack allows us to come all the way down to running a configuration that's a couple of nodes in a data centre – but we do expect that one of the core target customers is managed service providers and hosters."
If there's a geography that doesn't have an Azure region yet, says Neil, a hoster or a consortium of businesses could create one using Azure Stack. "If a country wants to have public cloud and their GDP doesn't warrant a public Azure instance, there's an opportunity to do that. That means we can reach a broader set of customers."
