After one year of pandemic there is a very clear fact, a majority of enterprises expect to increase cloud usage. On this scenario, there are traditional lift & shift migrations but also many companies choose to paassify applications (strategy to move applications on VMs to cloud multi tenancy managed platforms like Azure AppServices or AWS  Elastic Beanstalk) or even more transform their applications to a containerization (the process of packaging an application along with its required libraries, frameworks, and configuration files together over a containerization engine as Docker )

In this context there are still lots of legacy applications and monolithic workloads that will remain during some years more in the backbone of business logic for a huge number of industries. Not to mention, some compliance or sovereignty policies to retain specific information in local data centers for the company or the country. So the battle in coming years for the cloud providers is go hybrid enough to leverage the cloud for new innovative solutions, for those areas where the competitors can win opportunities in our market, or where we can see the benefits to transform applications to the cloud, such as increase Got-To-market in other regions, improve efficiency, reduce risk, save money and eliminate points of failure.

How is the Microsoft hybrid strategy?

There are several technologies that bring a lot of value to the Azure hybrid scenario. The Mantra here is run what you want where you need it without losing control even if it’s on premise, a private cloud like BT or Telefonica or a different cloud provider like AWS with their compute IaaS solutions on EC2.

---

Azure Stack Hub

Azure Stack will be your solution if you want to leverage the potential of serverless but using your infrastructure locally as well. You can connect your local data center using Azure Stack Hub.

For example, let’s say you need to maintain on premise a data warehouse due to regulations but you need a HPC (high performance computing) or even MPP (massive parallel processing ) from time to time to perform some calculations with some dataset and you don’t want to invest a lot of money for this stationary estimations. All the outcomes will be store locally once they are prepared and transformed in more accurate data in the cloud. Obviously, the cluster and the slaves nodes will be shut down afterwards.

Azure Stack Edge

Collect data, analyse, transform and filter data at the edge, sending only the data you need to the cloud for further processing or storage. Use ML (Machine Learning) to prepare datasets that you need to upload to the cloud. Azure Stack Edge acts as a cloud storage gateway which transfers to Azure whats is needed, while retaining local access to files. It has local cache capability and bandwidth throttling to limit usage during peak business hours.

Boost your IoT, and Edge computing solutions with this technology. The opportunities to grow here is just your imagination.

There are several models that can work at your edge depending on your needs. Just need to Simply order your appliance from the Azure portal in a hardware-as-a-service model and paid monthly via an Azure subscription.

Azure Stack HCI

It is a new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) operating system delivered as an Azure service that provides the latest azure features as well as performance to work with the cloud. Therefore, you can roll out Windows and Linux virtual machines (VMs) in your data centre or at the edge using the previous appliances showed above.

For example, let’s say you want to set up a Disaster Recovery strategy using world-class hyper-converged infrastructure with some Linux LAMP solutions or specific applications with the backend tier running on Azure Stack HCI and the frontend with some Web Services running on Azure. But the data remains on your data center once again if your country or company regulations don´t allow to store it on the cloud.

But the strongest point in this Microsoft Hybrid solution will be to provide an integration with AKS so your applications will be running anywhere from on premise to any azure region. You will be able to deploy containers on the same network, your VNET on Azure together with your VLAN on premise and move, create or kill containers of thousand on applications with their own libraries, run time and piece of software from cluster to cluster empowered with Kubernetes. Can you believe such potential for a global enterprise company?.

Azure Arc

Here comes the key ingredient of the recipe. Azure Arc let users to connect Kubernetes clusters running on-premises or on any other cloud provider with Azure for a unified management experience. Arc provides a single pane of glass operating model to users for all their Kubernetes clusters deployed across multiple locations and platforms. Arc provides capabilities of Azure management to the clusters — even improving the experience with Azure features like Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, and Azure Resource Graph.

In a single pane of glass you can embrace the potential of Azure hybrid model across multiple tenants and subscriptions working together with Azure Lighthouse as well as integrating Azure Stack to roll out your application modernization strategy anywhere, anytime. Can you figure out the tremendous benefits to your customers, users and partners to be there when it’s needed reducing risks as eliminate single point of failure, reduce latency and improve business continuity, better security and governance or increase in an exponential manner your Go-To-Market strategies?.

In the next post, we will compare the hybrid potential that Microsoft offers with another big gigant, AWS.

See you them, take care and stay safe…