Overview:
The Windows Azure Pack delivers Microsoft Azure technologies for you to run inside your datacenter enabling, rich, self-service, multi-tenant services and experiences that are consistent with Microsoft’s public cloud offering.
Microsoft Azure-consistent experiences and services in your datacenter
The Windows Azure Pack is a collection of Microsoft Azure technologies available to Microsoft customers at no additional cost. Once installed in your datacenter, the Windows Azure Pack integrates with System Center and Windows Server to help provide a self-service portal for managing services such as websites, Virtual Machines, and Service Bus; a portal for administrators to manage resource clouds; scalable web hosting; and more.
Enterprises today want the flexibility and affordability that cloud environments offer, while service providers want the ability to win and easily on-board more enterprise customers. Windows Azure Pack builds on the power of Windows Server and System Center to deliver an enterprise-class, cost-effective solution for self-service, multi-tenant cloud infrastructure and application services.
Windows Azure Pack brings Windows Azure technologies to the datacenter, addressing a number of key requirements for service providers and enterprises who want to embrace the service provider model for delivering IT services.
Windows Azure delivers an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy, and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
Windows Azure and Windows Azure Pack tie into the Microsoft vision for the Cloud OS, a hybrid cloud solution that helpsenterprises transform their current infrastructure to deliver agility and cost effectiveness. With the Cloud OS, companies can quickly and flexibly build and manage modern applications across platforms, locations, and devices, unlock insights from volumes of existing and new data, and support user productivity wherever they are and on whatever device they choose.
Features:
Windows Azure technology in your datacenter
The advent of cloud computing has transformed the datacenter, driving more and more enterprises to move their development, test, and production environments to hosted and public clouds as a means of gaining more flexibility and reducing costs. Likewise, for service providers, cloud computing represents a huge growth opportunity. However, in order to attract enterprise customers,service providers need to have a familiar technology stack that enterprises can trust and integrate with their on-premises datacenters.
Windows Azure Pack provides a multi-tenant, self-service cloud that works on top of your existing software and hardware investments. Building on the familiar foundation of Windows Server and System Center, Windows Azure Pack offers a flexible and familiar solution that your business can take advantage of to deliverself-service provisioning and management of infrastructure — Infrastructure as a service (Iaas), and application services — Platform as a Service (PaaS), such as Web Sites and Virtual Machines.
Offer consistent Windows Azure self-service management experiences
The Management Portal in Windows Azure Pack enables you to control how you offer IT services to your tenants while also providing tenants with a rich, self-service user experience for provisioning and managing resources. To enable this functionality, Windows Azure Pack offers the following Management portals:
- The Management Portal for Tenants. This portal, consistent with the Windows Azure Developer portal experience found in Windows Azure, offers self-service provisioning and management capabilities for tenants. Multiple authentication technologies include Active Directory Federation Services.
- The Management Portal for Administrators. This portal enables administrators to configure and manage the services and resource clouds that are made available to tenants.
Provide high-density web application hosting
The Web Sites service simplifies the deployment and administration of multi-tenant, high-density website hosting services. The Web App Gallery gives tenants access to popular web applications while the Windows Azure Pack delivers supporting SQL and MySQL database capabilities. The Web Sites service also supports many application frameworks including ASP.NET, Classic ASP, PHP, and Node.js with full GitHub, BitBucket, DropBox and Team Foundation Server integration for source code control.
Deliver flexible infrastructure services
The Virtual Machines service of the Windows Azure Pack builds on the Service Provider Foundation (SPF) API provided with System Center 2012 to enable self-service IaaS. This capability lets tenants self-provision scalable Windows Server and Linux virtual machines from a gallery of predefined images. Virtual networking enables simple migration from a tenant’s existing network configurations and IP architectures while Virtual Machine Roles facilitatethe creation of dynamically scalable tiers of virtual machines for load-balancing and resilience. Tenants can also connect to the virtual machine console from their portal for simplified management and configuration.
Help IT users integrate their application components
The Service Bus service in Windows Azure Pack enables applications to pass messages to each other when asynchronous hand-off is not possible, but the sender needs assurance that the message will reach the recipient eventually. Applications may be within the same cloud, across clouds, clouds and devices or many other supported scenarios. The following two solutions come as part of the Service Bus service:
- Queues. Service Bus queues provide asynchronous buffering, enabling the message receiver to process messages at its own pace. As a result, you can scale out your applications more effectively and bring more resilience to your architecture.
- Topics. Service Bus topics and subscriptions provide rich publish-subscribe capabilities that let multiple, concurrent subscribers independently retrieve filtered or unfiltered views of the published message stream. Service Bus topics and subscriptions help you scale to process large volumes of messages across multiple users and applications.
Benefits
Self-service IT from your datacenter
Deliver IT services through a rich self-service portal to help enable hybrid cloud scenarios across private, public, and hosted clouds.
Web PAAS - Platform-as-a-Service
Create high-density, scalable web application hosting services that are simpler to deploy and administer.
IAAS - Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Create Infrastructure as a Service offerings for Windows Server and Linux VMs, integrated with software defined networking capabilities for straightforward migration and deployment.
Database as a service
Create cloud-based database offerings that are easily provisioned and administered.
Developer friendly
Build and deploy applications using many popular development frameworks, platforms, and tools including source control repositories.
Capabilities:
The Windows Azure Pack is a collection of Microsoft Azure technologies available to Microsoft customers at no additional cost. Once installed in your datacenter, the Windows Azure Pack integrates with System Center and Windows Server to help provide the following capabilities:
Management portal for tenants
A Microsoft Azure-consistent, customizable self-service portal experience for provisioning, monitoring and management of services such as Web Sites, Virtual Machines, and Service Bus.
Management portal for administrators
A portal for administrators to configure and manage resource clouds, user accounts, tenant offers, quotas, and pricing.
Service management API
The foundation for the capabilities in the management portal, the service management API is an OData REST API that helps enable a range of integration scenarios including custom portals and billing systems.
Web Sites
Consistent with Microsoft Azure Web Sites, this service helps provide a high-density, scalable shared web hosting platform for ASP.NET, PHP, and Node.js web applications. It includes a customizable web application gallery of popular open source web applications and integration with source control systems for custom-developed websites and applications.
Virtual Machines
Consistent with Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines, this service helps provide Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities for Windows and Linux virtual machines (VMs). It includes a VM template gallery, scaling options, and virtual networking capabilities.
Service Bus
Consistent with Microsoft Azure Service Bus, this service helps provide reliable messaging services between distributed applications. It includes queued and topic-based publish/subscribe capabilities.
Automation and extensibility
The Windows Azure Pack also includes capabilities for automating and integrating additional custom services into the services framework, including a runbook editor and execution environment.
Documentation:
Download the Microsoft Azure Pack Datasheet (PDF).
