Welcome to this book. Azure Stack is one of the most important and interesting products of Microsoft today and is the future as it brings Azure and Azure technologies to your data center if you are either an enterprise or service provider. You can use the same methodology, processes, and concepts that you have already developed for public Azure and reuse them in your Azure Stack data center. As Azure Stack comes as an integrated system, there is not much implementation time; you will just have to add the hardware to your data center and connect it to your network, and you can start adding your services to it right now. As the magic technology of Azure and Azure Stack relies on Azure Resource Manager, there is no need to think differently; you would just have to think the same as with Azure, and you will be successful.
This book gives you the basics to start with Azure Stack, develop your own services, and provide them as offers to your internal or external customers.
For future updates please visit: http://www.azurestack.rocks.
Chapter 1, The Microsoft Azure Stack Architecture, gives you a detailed overview of the technology and design aspects that Microsoft is relying on with Azure Stack. In addition, you will see how Azure Stack can help you in your network environment to solve issues you are currently struggling with as you could not move them to public Azure.
Chapter 2, Planning the Deployment of Microsoft Azure Stack for Private Clouds, talks about how you need to be well prepared when planning to implement Azure Stack. Therefore, we will discuss infrastructure designs and you will learn how to add Azure Stack to your data center without running into most of the issues you could run into. You will need to plan in advance, and we will help you in doing that.
Chapter 3, Deploying Microsoft Azure Stack, covers how Azure Stack is available as the so-called Azure Stack Development Toolkit and Azure Stack Multi-Node Deployment. You will learn how to prepare and install Azure Stack Deployment Toolkit for your Proof of Concept and what to know before you order a preconfigured production deployment. It is also good to know the way your hardware OEM will be used to set up your environment.
Chapter 4, Understanding Storage and Network, gives you a technical overview of the Azure Stack components. You will learn how they interact in between. Understanding this gives you a good chance to understand what is going on internally with Azure Stack.
Chapter 5, Provisioning Virtual Machines, discusses how once Azure Stack is up and running, you will need to know how to implement Infrastructure as a Service. This chapter will show you how to do that properly.
Chapter 6, Creating a Private Cloud Solution, covers how once you start with IaaS, you will set up your private cloud with Azure Stack. We will show you the good practices of doing this.
Chapter 7, Understanding Automation in Microsoft Azure Stack, ascertains that the goal of cloud means providing IT services on an industrial level. This means we need to do away from manual tasks and use automation. This chapter will talk about Automation with Azure Stack.
Chapter 8, Creating PaaS Services in Microsoft Azure Stack, mentions that the goal of Azure Stack is not just to lift and shift your virtual machine to the cloud. You will have to move to Platform as a Service. In this chapter, we will discuss the PaaS Services that come with Azure Stack as general availability.
Chapter 9, Managing and Administering Private Clouds with Microsoft Azure Stack, covers running cloud services and how they are somehow different in comparison to on-premise installations. This chapter will discuss the concept of shared responsibility.
Chapter 10, Integrating Public Cloud Services with Microsoft Azure Stack, discusses how Azure Stack can win the race of technology when integrating Azure services into Azure Stack using a hybrid cloud model.
Chapter 11, Creating a Hybrid Cloud Solution, gives you an overview of what to do next when Azure Stack is up and running and how to succeed with Azure Stack-adding container features.
Chapter 12, Infrastructure as Code – Azure Functions and Other Future Scenarios, discusses the Code as a Service feature with Azure Stack—so called functions and give an idea of what may come with Azure Stack Agile updates in the future, what makes sense, and what does not.
Learning Azure Stack means knowing how Azure works beforehand. This is the main requirement for this book. In addition, our website, http://www.azurestack.rocks, will give you more and deeper information if you want to dive deeper into specific services.
The book is for administrators and architects who are planning to implement or administer a hybrid cloud infrastructure using Microsoft Cloud Technology. This book is ideal for those who are looking forward to implementing and running a hybrid cloud infrastructure with PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS services.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning. Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The VHD gets uploaded and the manifest.json file gets created."
A block of code is set as follows:
{
"$schema": http://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/
deploymentTeplate.json#,
"contentVersion": "",
"parameters": { },
"variables": { },
"resources": [ ],
"outputs": { }
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
{
"$schema": http://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/
deploymentTeplate.json#,
"contentVersion": "",
"parameters": { },
"variables": { },
"resources": [ ],
"outputs": { }
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
RegisterWithAzure.ps1 -azureDirectory YourDirectory -azureSubscriptionId YourGUID -azureSubscriptionOwner YourAccountName
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Finally, it is here in the Physical Nodes tab, that defines the IP addresses, hostnames, and so on."
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