back to article Microsoft gets edge on AWS with Azure Stack for government

Microsoft has kicked out a build of its Azure Stack on-premise cloud for US government use. The release extends Microsoft's Azure program for the government into the on-prem market, and gives Redmond one more selling point in its battle with AWS to land the lucrative IT service contracts Uncle Sam regularly hands out. By …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Mushroom

    Intelligent edge hybrid cloud infrastructure environment

    use cases for an on-prem Azure cloud would include things like field offices or government embassies where officials would not want sensitive information to be travelling over potentially tapped internet connections.”

    If yer local cloud is connected to your hybrid cloud through the Internet then ...

    This is possible because Azure Stack extends the best of our intelligent edge and cloud innovation and delivers those services anywhere in the environment through a hybrid approach.”

    What?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There should be a VERY big asterisk in this announcement along the lines of:

    * provided you don't need more than 16 nodes (finally up from 12) in your Stack cluster. Of course, if you do need more than 16 nodes, you can always deploy a 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc. Stack deployment, but these will all have their own ASR management planes and no way to integrate with each other - seperate APIs, subscriptions, networks, firewalls et al in each. Eventually we'll get around to allowing Stack to expand beyond a single cluster (promised for 2017, now looking like maybe 2019) - and when we get there you won't be able to consolidate your Stack deployed clusters into one as we're not going to support that. Oh yes, and did we mention that multi-datacenter is now planned for 2020 (maybe, if we can figure out how to do it by then).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "provided you don't need more than 16 nodes"

      Seeing as the alternative is zero nodes from the competition its not much of a disadvantage.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "Seeing as the alternative is zero nodes from the competition its not much of a disadvantage."

        My multi-rack OpenStack deployment disagrees with you. And before you ask, yes it's fast, scalable and the users love it.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          "My multi-rack OpenStack deployment disagrees with you"

          But that's not a run out of the box transparent hybrid extension of a market leading vendors public cloud, and doesn't let you run everything that the vendors cloud does out of the box, does it? That's just a random private cloud choice.

          Anyway, 64 node Azure Stack is coming with Server 2019, and you will be able to glue together multiple 64 node clusters with a "master cluster resource" feature.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            "But that's not a run out of the box transparent hybrid extension of a market leading vendors public cloud"

            Say what? That's a statement straight from the crayon department.

            ..."doesn't let you run everything that the vendors cloud does out of the box, does it?"

            Funnily enough, neither does Azure Stack. We have considered it and are watching it closely. Once it's more mature we might deploy it, but it looks to be a couple of years off at least.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Zero nodes from competition...That's not correct, plenty of options.

        VMWare on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/vmware

        EC2 on AWS Snowball:

        https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/07/new-sbe1-instances-for-snowball-edge

        Allows running EC2 on Edge Devices

        SAM Local

        https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-sam-local-beta-build-and-test-serverless-applications-locally/

        Allows you to build and test Serverless applications locally

  3. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    Full circle

    So it is tacitly agreed that remote-Cloud data storage is not perfect. This story indicates that On-prem Cloud is the new way to go.

    The difference between On-prem cloud and an On-prem server is that the latter can be maintained by your I.T. department. But because you've shed those jobs and no longer have an I.T. department you are forced to deal with the remotely-based On-prem Cloud team if you need tech support.

    So how is that going to work?

    Either a remotely-based on-prem Cloud representative will come round and fix your On-prem Cloud appliance (cue memories of calling out British Gas to service your boiler which is under a BG service contract) OR (in most circumstances) the remotely-based Cloud representative can dial-in to your On-prem Cloud appliance and figure out what's wrong. As presumably you will not have access to the gubbins of the On-prem Cloud appliance to mend it yourself.

    Hmm, that doesn't sound so nice from a security angle.

    Plus, how many times will you hear the excuse - ah, your Router/Firewall is mis-configured, I can't see your On-prem Cloud appliance, or you seem to have an internet problem?

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Full circle

      I'm not against the idea of on-premesis cloud services [in fact I thought that' what it was SUPPOSED to be] but a "public cloud" is *HIGHLY* overrated, that's for sure.

      'Cloudy' for when it makes sense. PRIVATE cloudy so that a large organization can manage it without being evil-spy'd upon on or slurped. But, NOT for your day-to-day operations. No. Distribute that and process it LOCALLY [even if it means frequent to-the-cloud backups for safe keeping].

      But yeah if gummint were using the PUBLIC cloud, it'd be like "slurp wars", "Slurp vs Slurp" etc..

      Can you imagine gummints telling MICROSOFT to "not SLURP us" or LOSE the contract???

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