To really answer this question (" What is Azure Stack? ") effectively, what we may need to do Is take a step back and look at some of the challenges that organizations are facing in adopting cloud computing today. Today many organizations are looking at tapping into public cloud for instant capacity on demand as well as rich automation that the most public clouds provide. sometimes these organizations turn and look at their on-premises environment and realize that perhaps what they have "isn’t someone’s cloud as much as virtualization?". As a result many organizations are looking at bolting on third party solutions to provide them with that intelligent stack to give them more cloud like features in their on-premises environment. The problem is some of these solutions can be fragmented and complex, on top of that if you are trying to operate in a hybrid cloud environment, you now have different API’s, different portals, different operational procedures, different scripting languages and different skill sets these things all become a barrier to being able to fully adopt the value of cloud computing across the hybrid cloud in your organization.

Azure Stack was designed to overcome these limitations as Azure stack was built upon the windows server 2016 wave of products including Nano Server, Storage Space Direct, Software Defined Networking (SDN). Basically all the things that Microsoft learn will operate azure when incorporated into the platform. Azure Stack sits on top of that providing a common foundation across both on-premises and public cloud environments. A common language in PowerShell; a Common Portal, common DevOps tools, Visual Studio for developers, Azure Resource Manager (ARM) are including role-based access control and a Rich Fabric Integration that interoperates directly within underlying operating system. Also, your active directory provides consistent Identity management across this fact. From this common foundation organizations can deploy applications of any maturity ranging from IaaS to even microservices based on Azure or service fabric.

Azure Stack- Enabling the Hybrid cloud

Today’s solutions are available for the private cloud and the public cloud but Azure stack is unique. Azure Stack provides a unifying framework across both the Private and Public cloud environments. Write Once and Deploy Anywhere design build your applications in visual studio. Complete with your Load Balancers, Firewall Rules and one deployment time comes you can choose to deploy that application with all its complexity to either your private on-premises environment or to the Azure Public Cloud. Azure stack enables consistent and Rapid Delivery Across BOTH Private and Public Clouds.