Microsoft Azure Stack is a hybrid cloud platform which you can run in your own datacenter. Azure Stack is consistent with Azure. Microsoft Azure possibilities and solutions are extensive and have ben in development for years. Not all of the possibilities have been ported to Azure Stack yet and because of the scale it probably never will.
At present time you will be able to find in Azure Stack:
- Compute
- Managed disks (support in 1808 update, default in 1811 update)
- Virtual Machine Scale Sets (1808 update)
- Managed Images (1901 update)
- Storage
- Networking
- Keyvault
- Azure Resource Manager
- Managability (Portal, Visual Studio, PowerShell and CLI)
- Azure Monitor (1808 update)
- Azure Stack syslog client (1809 update)
- Extension host (1811 update)
The SQL Server, MySQL and App Service Resource Provider need to be installed and configured after the installation (or handover) of Azure Stack. Before you do so, you would have to build the back-end infrastructure first.
How to offer highly available SQL databases on Azure Stack.
How to offer highly available mySQL databases on Azure Stack.
Updates on Azure Stack are expected on a monthly cadence.
Azure Stack integrated system
Microsoft Azure Stack is delivered as an integrated system by Microsoft and one of the following partners:
- avanade
- Cisco
- Dell EMC
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- HUAWEI
- Lenovo
- terra
The smallest configuration you can order is 4 nodes to a maximum of 16 nodes (1809 update).
Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK)
Installing the Microsoft Azure Stack Development Kit is a great way to evaluate the possibilities of Azure Stack. The ASDK is a single node installation with no redundancy on the infrastructure roles. However, this ASDK is more open than the integrated system and is a great opportunity to look under the hood of Azure Stack. I recommend you invest in a single node installation before you consider acquiring Microsoft Azure Stack.