Intelligent cloud Services are SLT’s latest addition to Akaza Multi-Cloud services to all segment of customers. Azure Stack hub enables you to deploy and manage Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) applications from the provider’s data centre in a hybrid cloud environment, or in a private cloud scenario.

While Azure offers many services, at the time of writing, Azure Stack Hub offers fewer in comparison.

Currently, the following services are available with Azure Stack:

• Compute: Including Windows and Linux virtual machines and virtual machine extensions.
• Storage: Including blobs, tables, and queues.
• Networking: Including virtual networking, load balancers, and virtual private network (VPN) gateways.
• PaaS: Including web applications, mobile applications, functions, databases, and API applications.
• Security: Including Key Vault.

Azure Stack Hub service is multi-tenant. Which means the host (or provider) of Azure Stack can offer similar services to multiple tenants while isolating its resources from other tenants. For service providers, Azure Stack can be implemented where multiple customers required to be served.

Azure Stack is also suitable for large organizations which is required to offer services to multiple departments while maintaining isolation between each other.

Azure Stack also provides automated deployment of applications and services with reusable templates through Azure Resource Manager. You can use one of the following tools to deploy resources in Azure Stack:

• Azure Stack Administrator Portal
• Azure Resource Manager
• Visual Studio
• Azure PowerShell
• Azure Command Line Interface (CLI)
• Direct REST API interaction

You can use the CLI to manage Azure Stack on Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems. You can deploy Azure Stack within a single region, or in a scaled-out environment across multiple regions. This is similar to Azure deployment except that the Azure Stack resources are located on SLT infrastructure instead of in the Azure infrastructure.

Another key feature of Azure Stack is the interface that you use to manage applications and services. The interface and its underlying API’s are the same as that Azure provides. This is important because some organizations might prefer to manage some applications on-premises in a private cloud, whereas they might host other applications in the public cloud. Whether the application is hosted in Azure or Azure Stack, the interface to manage them is the same. Therefore, you do not need to learn how to use a new interface.

• Provides application developers the ability to be more productive. Using Azure Resource Manager and templates, you can quickly deploy applications in a consistent manner.
• You can use the knowledge and experience you gained with using Azure when managing and consuming Azure Stack.
• Service Providers adopting Azure Stack can provide cloud services across the globe.
• IT organizations can provide cloud services on demand.

Azures Stack Services

IaaS Virtual Machines

Different virtual machine images in different sizes and storage options, in both Windows and Linux flours. (include all major Linux distributions). Customers can bring their own images and Azure Stack Marketplace images can be used to quickly deploy the favorite services like LAMP stack, WAMP stack, WordPress, software firewalls, backup agents, monitoring tools, software load balances, etc.

Azure App Service

PaaS App Service to deploy web applications written in all major languages (ASP.NET, Java, Node, Go, Ruby, PHP, Python, etc.) App Services provides easy integration with your DevOps tools.

SQL Database and MySQL PaaS

Both SQL databases and MySQL databases are available as PaaS services for customers to design applications with the less overhead of database server management. On a higher volume of storage requirements, Azure Stack Hub databases PaaS database services can be stretched to cloud and manage hot and cold data layers automatically.

Azure Storage

Azure Storage services includes managed Blob storage, Table storage for table based No-SQL applications and Azure Queue for message / event drive architecture.

Azure Functions

Serverless service to host modern APIs in micro services architecture. Also Azure Functions can be used for event driven designs and scheduled functions.

Kubernetes

Fully managed Kubernetes service in ASH. Can be used to deploy orchestrater driven service deployments and container based applications.

Event Hubs

Event Hubs are used for streaming event ingestion and processing. High event volume applications like IoT systems, media streaming events, application telemetry, etc. can be mapped to use Event Hubs.

Azure Monitoring Services

Application and service monitoring services, to collect, analyze and alert telemetry and system logs. Customers can leverage these inbuilt services with low-cost out of the box integration.

Azure Devop

 Cloud technology and Azure Stack can help you adopt of practices that enable DevOps. For example, self-service in a cloud allows for rapid deployment of software utilizing what is known as Infrastructure as Code (IaC). By using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates in Azure Stack, you define reusable deployment configurations that you can use to quickly deploy application infrastructure with a predictable method that works every time. This is known as idempotent. The integration between ARM Templates and Desired State Configuration (DSC) enables you to also ensure the application is configured correctly when it is being deployed.

The issues noted in the scenario can also be duplicated when you move the application from the preproduction environment to production. These issues fall into three main areas:

• The infrastructure required for the application is defined separately from the application.
• There are several hand-offs between development and operations.
• The definitions for deployment are platform-specific.

This can also mean that the deployment of the application to the cloud will also be problematic due to the infrastructure requirements. With Azure Stack and Azure, the workflow of the development process changes as shown in the following process:

• The application and infrastructure code are developed at the same time and stored in the same repository.
• The application is configured to run in the staging, preproduction, and production environments regardless of whether that is on-premises (Azure Stack) or in the public cloud (Azure).

This workflow has the following benefits:

• Infrastructure required for the application is defined as code (IaC), which implies fewer errors.
• Deployment times are faster providing end users with more value from their applications.
• Requirements can be defined for on-premises, off-premises, or both.