On-Premises Data Center: Your Apps and Devs Are Cheating on You

This blog was originally written for and posted at: http://windowsitpro.com/blog/premises-data-center-your-apps-and-devs-are-cheating-you

Gabriel is a Lead Developer for Halo Corporation. Halo Corporation follows an agile development cycle and thus was notified that the business has given the OK and should now begin preparing development for v6 of their upcoming software release. Traditionally Gabriel would make a Service Request for a new round of development virtual machines. Unfortunately, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for IT to respond to this request is 14 days. Gabriel secretly made a quick decision and has since created a Microsoft Azure subscription and was able to spin up the entire development environment in an afternoon!

This situation is becoming more common, and it’s quite unfortunate. IT cannot respond in a timely fashion and developers are secretly performing work off-premises just to meet strict project deadlines. Senior IT Management at Halo Corporation simply cannot justify and in turn is extremely reluctant and nervous to move any on-premises data out to a public cloud provider. What if IT could provide the look, smell and feel of the Azure experience on-premises?

Back at Microsoft Ignite in May 2015 Microsoft made many large announcements, one being the introduction of Azure Stack. Azure Stack allows on-premises IT Departments to mimic the hyper-scale Azure model within their own datacenter. Built on the exact GUI and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) as the off-prem Azure makes all of the existing API’s, PowerShell and development tools like Visual Studio that everyone has become so familiar with integrating today fast and easy.

Cloud based Azure and On-Premises Azure Stack provides great benefits for IT Professionals as well as Developers. When IT and Development work well ultimately the entire organization succeeds and benefits. Developers now will have the opportunity to write code once and deploy it twice! Azure Stack uses the exact same API’s as Microsoft Azure. Regardless if your development team writes .NET or open source or where the resource is provisioned. Azure Stack, through the course of several Technical Previews will continue to be built upon which will lead up to general availability. Microsoft also plans to continue to add more applications and components to IT Infrastructure professionals will expand their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings while maintaining visibility, management and insight into the tools that manage and operate Azure today. The ultimate goal of everything is to provide value to the business by responding to the needs in an agile fashion while maintaining environmental consistency between on and off-premises Azure environments.

Microsoft has recently released the initial Technical Preview of Azure Stack. I strongly encourage anyone interested in learning more about the Azure Stack experience to download and begin to learn and experiment with Azure Stack in your own datacenter! Microsoft has defined the exact steps and hardware requirements to get this proof of concept rolling, so what are you waiting for!?!

With the introduction of Azure Stack into the environment Gabriel will no longer have to cheat on his friends in the on-premises data center by taking secretly taking development off-prem. This makes