10 NEW Azure Stack Announcements from Ignite!

Last week at  Ignite Microsoft announced plenty of exciting new investments in Azure Stack to extend Microsoft’s hybrid cloud leadership.

At Ignite last year, Microsoft launched Azure Stack in 46 countries/regions, and given customer demand since then, Microsoft worked with hardware partners to double the number of countries/regions Azure Stack now supports.

Microsoft Azure Stack expands availability to 92 countries/regions!!!

Azure Stack integrated systems partners help you extend Azure on-premises!

" Integrated systems partners"

Additionally, Microsoft have been collaborating with ecosystem partners to help customers navigate their business needs.

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.

New innovation and Azure services coming to Azure Stack

Lets look at 10 new updates out of Microsoft Ignite:

Many customers have asked when they can expect to see IoT services on Azure Stack, given the hybrid and edge computing capabilities offered by Azure Stack. 

Last week at Ignite, Microsoft announced that both  Azure IoT Hub and  Azure Event Hub services will be in private preview on Azure Stack by calendar year Q4 2018.

Azure IoT Hub 

Connect, monitor, and manage billions of IoT assets—Use Azure IoT Hub to securely connect, monitor, and manage billions of devices to develop Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

Azure Event Hub 

Focus on drawing insights from your data instead of managing infrastructure. Build real-time big data pipelines and respond to business challenges right away.

Ethereum Blockchain solution on Azure Stack!!!

The Ethereum solution template is designed to make it easier and quicker to deploy and configure a multi-member consortium Ethereum blockchain network with minimal Azure and Ethereum knowledge.

With a handful of user inputs and a single-click deployment through the Azure Stack tenant portal, each member can provision their network footprint. 

This solution template can deploy single or multi member Ethereum consortium network. The virtual network is connected in a chain topology using Network Virtual Appliance and connection resources.

Customers can now use Managed Disks in Azure Stack virtual machines and virtual machine scale sets.

Managed Disks simplifies disk management for IaaS VMs by managing the storage accounts associated with the VM disks.

Customers can work with Azure Monitor data by using the Azure Stack admin portal, Monitor PowerShell Cmdlets, Cross-Platform CLI, or Azure Monitor REST APIs. 

Azure Monitor is the platform service that provides a single source for monitoring Azure resources. With Azure Monitor, you can visualize, query, route, archive, and otherwise take action on the metrics and logs coming from resources in Azure.

Use the  Service Fabric Cluster item from the Azure Marketplace to deploy a secured Service Fabric cluster in A zure Stack.

Service Fabric is an open source project and it powers core Azure infrastructure as well as other Microsoft services such as Skype for Business, Intune, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Data Factory, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, Dynamics 365, and Cortana. 

Focus on building applications and business logic, and let Azure solve the hard distributed systems problems such as reliability, scalability, management, and latency.

Kubernetes on Azure Stack is now in public preview!!

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and managing of applications in containers.

Customers can install Kubernetes using Azure Resource Manager templates generated by the ACS-Engine on 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.

Site Recovery contributes to your business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy. The service ensures that your VM workloads remain available when expected and unexpected outages occur.

Azure Update & Configuration Management of VMs running on Azure Stack is now available!

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.

New Developer tools and Frameworks on Azure Stack!!

1. New Terraform providers that enable Kubernetes deployments
2. .NET and Java SDKs with API Profile support
3. New API Profile release: 2018-03-01-Hybrid
4. Continued updates to API version support (CRP, SRP, and NRP)
5. QuickStart templates and scripts that showcase Hybrid Patterns (Hadoop, Block Chain, and Sample Cloud Scale Application template)
6. High-available VM images from Bitnami in the Azure Stack Marketplace like Hadoop, MySQL, and others

Support for larger scale

1. Microsoft 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.
2. Customers have also asked Microsoft 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.

Security

1.  Syslog client is generally available now to support Syslog Information Event Management (SIEM) integration.
2. In addition, Microsoft worked with Qualys to provide vulnerability scanning reports and compliance with DISA STIG and other standards for the Azure Stack infrastructure.
3. 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.

I am really excited to bring all the new Azure Stack updates to you. Please have a look at other articles as well.

Thanks

Susanth