Windows Azure Pack, along with System Center and Hyper-V, provides enterprise class IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and DBaaS (Database as a Service) capabilities. The following are the primary features and capabilities that Windows Azure Pack provides once it is deployed:
Management portal for cloud admins: Windows Azure Pack Service management portal for administrators provides facilities to create and manage a cloud offerings catalogue, resource providers, tenants user accounts, plans and subscriptions, and much more. This portal will be used by cloud admin of organization or service providers.
Management portal for tenants: The service management portal for tenants is used by tenant admins for self-service capabilities. Using this portal, tenants can provision, manage, and monitor cloud services available to them such as IaaS, websites, and databases.
Service management REST API: The service management API is the core of capabilities that the management portal delivers. It can be used to provide custom resource offerings and portal integrations.
Virtual machines: This is one of the core offerings using Windows Azure Pack. It provides Windows and Linux Virtual Machines based on Hyper-V and System Center. It includes VM gallery items for different OS flavors, VM roles for automated services provisioning post VM deployment, and scaling options.
Virtual networks: Windows Azure Pack tenant portal provides self-services capabilities to tenant admin to create their own virtual network along with required IP schema and VPN configurations. It works using System Center and Hyper-V Network Virtualization technologies. Virtual networks also provide site to site VPN capabilities, which can extend customers' on-premises network to cloud providers' network for hybrid cloud requirements.
Databases: This offering enables DBaaS capabilities for MS SQL servers and MySQL database servers. Tenants can create databases using tenant service management portals, which can be used by web servers or by any other applications for database needs.
Websites: Windows Azure Pack provides a scalable shared web hosting platform which can be leveraged by service providers or organizations to run web workloads. This is consistent with Microsoft Azure Public Cloud websites capabilities. Along with supporting ASP.NET, PHP, and Node.js applications, Website Cloud provides gallery items built-in for popular web applications such as WordPress and integration with custom developed applications and systems.
Automation:: Windows Azure Pack includes capabilities to have custom automation enabled in environments using integration with Service Management Automation (SMA), which is part of the System Center orchestrator product. With SMA integration, custom runbooks and workflows can be written and executed in an automated manner.
Custom offerings: Windows Azure Pack architecture allows integration of additional custom services into the service catalogue. These capabilities allow the cloud service providers to provide anything as a service. Organizations and service providers can design and develop custom resource providers for custom offering enablement.
Service bus: This service enables the provision of a reliable asynchronous messaging service between distributed applications. Service bus solves the challenges of communicating between on-premises applications and the outside world by allowing on-premises web services to project public endpoints.