Microsofts Latest On-prem Azure Is For Apps You Dont Want In The Cloud, But Will Manage From It

Microsoft’s latest on-prem Azure offering is more about unified management than hybrid cloud as an enabler of elasticity or flexible resource pools.

The offering is called Azure Local and was announced late last year among the blizzard of news at Microsoft’s Ignite conference. We therefore caught up with Bernardo Caldas, Microsoft’s senior VP for Azure Edge to learn more about it.

He told us that like its predecessor Azure Stack, Azure Local runs in on-prem hardware and uses the same hypervisor that runs in the Azure public cloud, plus Azure Kubernetes Service. Software-defined storage is included, too. So are all the connectors needed to pipe in Azure services.

The product is typically pre-installed on validated hardware provided by major server-makers and can be scaled into clusters of up to 16 nodes.

The product can also run on more modest hardware such as industrial gateways – essentially small servers run in single-node configurations and equipped with the sometimes exotic I/O options required by heavy machinery.

Azure Local is managed from Azure Arc, the cloudy tools Microsoft suggests as the best way to manage resources in the Azure cloud. Yet Caldas told us that Microsoft suggests Azure Local as the tech customers use for workloads that aren’t suitable to run in the cloud.

That seeming contradiction is explained by Microsoft’s belief that some customers want a single operating model and toolset for all resources, are committed to Azure, and will therefore be happy using Arc to manage their remaining pockets of on-prem workloads that run on Azure Local.

Orgs that aren’t comfortable with the cloud at all can run a local VM that provides the same management experience as Arc.

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Caldas used the example of a video analytics application that generates more data than is feasible to upload as an example of the sort of workload at which Azure Local excels. He also mentioned Industrial gateways that monitor IoT data captured on the factory floor, as that info needs realtime analysis that isn't possible if uploaded to a cloud.

While the product can access Azure resources, it’s not designed to allow elastic cloud bursting. Instead, it can tap services like Azure IoT so that users get the same tools in the cloud or out on the edge in that industrial gateway running Azure Local.

Azure can also deliver important services like disaster recovery, through Azure Site Recovery. Again, however, the focus is on-prem action by failing over to another Azure Local resource rather than a cloudy VM as an emergency resource.

While the product went on sale last November, Caldas said work on disaggregated storage that allows disk capacity to scale independently of compute nodes is already on the to-do list and is typical of Microsoft’s plan to upgrade the product every two or three months (and make those upgrades easy with automated lifecycle management).

Disaggregated storage is something VMware and Nutanix have delivered in recent months, so Azure Local is playing catchup in that regard.

But Azure Local is not pitched as a direct competitor to those vendors, as was more-or-less the case with Azure Stack and Azure Stack HCI. Users of the latter can make an in-place upgrade to Azure Local, reflecting Microsoft’s belief that hybrid cloud can be about cloudy tools managing and being present in multiple environments, rather than as part of a pool of infrastructure resources. ®