Azure Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: Overview of Main Azure Stack Products

Hybrid cloud adoption continues to soar, driven by the need for more adaptable and resilient IT infrastructures. Businesses are increasingly leveraging Azure Hybrid Cloud to facilitate digital transformation, ensuring a balance between performance, cost-efficiency, and security.

The focus has shifted towards creating a seamless integration between on-premises, private, and public clouds, with Azure Hybrid Cloud at the forefront, providing a robust and versatile solution.

This article delves into the main Azure Stack products that underpin the Azure Hybrid Cloud infrastructure, providing a comprehensive overview including real-world use cases.

What is Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure?

A hybrid cloud infrastructure is a computing environment that seamlessly integrates and coexists with on-premises data centers, private clouds, and public clouds. This setup allows businesses to distribute their workloads optimally, leveraging the strengths of each environment. It provides the scalability and efficiency of public clouds while ensuring the security and control of private and on-premises solutions.

What is Azure Hybrid Cloud?

Azure Hybrid Cloud is Microsoft’s answer to the increasing demand for a flexible and scalable hybrid cloud solution. It combines Azure’s public cloud with Azure Stack—Microsoft’s on-premises cloud technology—and integrates with various other cloud environments. This combination enables businesses to run applications and store data across different environments, ensuring a seamless, secure, and highly adaptable IT infrastructure.

Benefits of Azure Hybrid Cloud

Azure Hybrid Cloud offers a multitude of benefits, catering to various business needs and scenarios. It provides unmatched flexibility, allowing businesses to scale resources on-demand while optimising costs. The platform ensures a consistent set of tools and services across environments, simplifying management and operations. Additionally, it prioritises security and compliance, ensuring that data is protected and governance policies are met across all platforms.

For example, the Volkswagen Group transitioned its portfolio of applications to Azure’s hybrid cloud to better manage and deploy a variety of self-developed applications, ensuring sensitive customer and financial data remained on-premises. Azure Stack facilitated this transition, providing enhanced security for data storage while leveraging Azure-native tools and computing resources for application provisioning. This strategic move significantly improved the scalability, performance, and understanding of application usage, availability, and performance.

Overview of Microsoft Azure Stack Products

At the heart of the Azure Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure is Microsoft Azure Stack, an extension of Azure’s capabilities into on-premises data centers, edge environments, and remote offices. 

It provides a consistent set of services and tools, ensuring that organisations can leverage Azure services and manage resources across the cloud, on-premises, and at the edge using the same familiar tools.

By providing a standardised architecture across cloud and on-premises environments, Azure Stack simplifies the complexity of managing diverse infrastructure, ensuring that organisations can focus on delivering innovative services and solutions. It is particularly beneficial for applications that require low latency, need to be run in specific geographic locations, or have specific regulatory or compliance requirements.

Here are some of its family of products.

Azure Stack Hub

Azure Stack Hub extends Azure services to on-premises environments, allowing for the creation of a private cloud using the same application logic, development tools, and DevOps processes used in Azure.

In addition to offering a range of Azure services, Azure Stack Hub also supports disconnected scenarios, allowing for the deployment of applications and services in environments with intermittent or no connectivity to the public cloud. This makes it an ideal solution for edge computing scenarios, as well as situations where data sovereignty and local compliance are of paramount importance.

Features

Application Modernisation: Utilise Azure services and containers for application development.

Self-Service Portal: Empower users with a portal for accessing services and applications.

Consistent Azure Experience: Ensure a unified experience across cloud and on-premises environments.

Benefits

Speed: Accelerate application development with cloud-inspired infrastructure.

Flexibility: Choose between connecting to Azure for hybrid capabilities or disconnecting for a fully on-premises experience.

Control: Maintain data sovereignty and comply with regulations by keeping data and applications local.

Use Case: Financial Services

A financial institution with strict data residency and compliance requirements can use Azure Stack Hub to build and run applications in a private cloud, ensuring that sensitive data remains on-premises while still benefiting from Azure’s tools and services.

Azure Stack Edge

Azure Stack Edge is a cloud-managed appliance that brings compute, storage, and intelligence to the edge, enabling organisations to address latency and bandwidth constraints by processing data closer to the source. This product is particularly well-suited for scenarios involving IoT devices, machine learning models, and real-time data analytics, as it allows for the rapid processing and analysis of data at the edge, before sending it to the cloud for further analysis or storage.

With Azure Stack Edge, organisations can unlock new capabilities and optimise their operations by leveraging the power of edge computing. Whether it’s reducing response times for critical applications, conserving bandwidth by preprocessing data locally, or running machine learning models at the edge, Azure Stack Edge provides a versatile and powerful platform that meets the needs of today’s data-driven world.

Features

Edge Computing: Process data locally in real-time.

AI at the Edge: Run machine learning models and get quicker insights.

Cloud Integration: Seamlessly integrate with Azure for extended capabilities.

Benefits

Reduced Latency: Process data close to where it’s generated, ensuring timely insights.

Enhanced Efficiency: Optimise bandwidth usage by processing data locally before sending it to the cloud.

Streamlined Management: Manage your edge devices from a centralised Azure portal.

Use Case: Retail

In retail, stores can use Azure Stack Edge to process sales transactions and customer interactions in real-time, ensuring a seamless customer experience. Data can be synchronized to Azure for advanced analytics, inventory management, and customer insights.

Azure Stack HCI

Azure Stack HCI offers a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) operating system delivered as an Azure service. It enables virtualisation of Windows and Linux VMs in data centers or at the edge. It also offers built-in connectivity to Azure for cloud-based management and security services.

Azure Stack HCI combines industry-standard hardware with Azure services, ensuring organisations can benefit from a scalable and secure infrastructure that integrates seamlessly with their existing Azure environment.

This product not only simplifies the management of virtualised environments but also provides a path for modernisation, enabling organisations to take advantage of cloud-native innovations while maintaining control over their on-premises infrastructure.

Features

Integrated System: Combine computing, storage, and networking on industry-standard hardware.

Built-in Azure Connectivity: Easily connect to Azure for cloud-based management capabilities.

Scalability: Scale resources up or down based on demand.

Benefits

Cost-Efficiency: Optimise existing hardware investments while benefitting from cloud connectivity.

Performance: Deliver high performance for your workloads with industry-standard hardware.

Security: Benefit from built-in security features and regular updates.

Use Case: Healthcare

Hospitals and healthcare providers can deploy Azure Stack HCI to run critical applications locally, ensuring high performance and reliability. Patient data can be secured and managed on-premises, while also taking advantage of Azure’s cloud services for backup, disaster recovery, and analytics.

Azure Arc

Azure Arc extends Azure’s management and governance capabilities to any infrastructure, providing a single control plane for managing resources across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments.

Azure Arc enables organisations to implement Azure services, management, and governance across their entire estate, regardless of where the resources are located.

With Azure Arc, IT professionals can manage various resources such as servers, Kubernetes clusters, and databases as if they were native Azure resources. This consistency reduces complexity and helps organisations to efficiently implement governance and management practices across their infrastructure.

Azure Arc supports a variety of scenarios, including the running of Azure data services on-premises, the management of Kubernetes applications across multiple environments, and the governance of resources sprawled across different clouds.

Features

Unified Management: Manage servers, Kubernetes clusters, and databases across different environments.

Governance and Compliance: Apply Azure policies across your environments for consistent governance.

Cloud Practices On-Premises: Bring cloud practices like DevOps and CI/CD to your on-premises environments.

Benefits

Increased Flexibility: Manage and govern resources across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments.

Enhanced Security: Apply consistent security and governance across all environments.

Streamlined Operations: Simplify complex and distributed environments with a single management plane.

Use Case: Manufacturing

Manufacturing companies with facilities spread across multiple locations can leverage Azure Arc to manage servers, Kubernetes clusters, and databases as if they were running in Azure. This ensures consistency in management practices, security policies, and governance across all locations.

Conclusion

Microsoft’s Azure Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, powered by the Azure Stack family of products, offers organisations unparalleled flexibility and control in managing their IT resources across diverse environments.

Whether it’s processing data at the edge, running applications in an on-premises data center, or leveraging the cloud for advanced analytics and insights, these tools provide a consistent and integrated experience, ensuring that organisations can meet their operational and strategic objectives. 

If you’re considering implementing Azure Hybrid Cloud or any of the Azure Stack products or just need expert guidance on hybrid cloud infrastructure, contact us at A1 Technologies.

Ken Mendiola

Marketing Operations professional with expertise in content marketing, growth strategy, and customer analytics. Writes about emerging technologies, AI, analytics, and marketing. Former contributor to HackerNoon, e27.co, TechinAsia, and TechWireAsia.