Microsoft Continues Efforts to Calm Azure Stack Anxiety

Continuing its attempts to pacify customers frustrated by the announcement last month that its new on-premise cloud system, Azure Stack, will only run on specific hardware sold by three vendors, Microsoft released a video where Vijay Tewari, who owns its hybrid cloud appliance strategy, explains the Azure Stack strategy in more detail.

The company’s explanation for limiting the initial release of the solution to systems by Dell, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo has been that it would not be feasible to do the kind of frequent continuous updates it wants to do on the platform if Azure Stack ran on hardware of each customer’s choosing – which is what it promised customers initially.

As IT Pro, one of our sister sites, summed up, some customers reacted to the change in deployment strategy by saying they had wasted their time waiting for Azure Stack and would now pursue OpenStack to build a cloud environment in their data centers. One customer said abandoning hardware specifically chosen for their high-density data center environment to get access to Azure Stack was a non-starter for them.

Microsoft has maintained that systems by Dell, HPE, and Lenovo will be the initial hardware supported by its on-prem cloud system, which will integrate with the public Azure cloud. For a lot more detail on Microsoft’s new Azure Stack strategy, read Microsoft: Azure Stack Will Be Sold Separately, Eventually.

Here’s the latest Azure Stack explainer video from Microsoft: