Azure Stack Hub extends capabilities on the Edge

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.

As hybrid cloud continues to evolve, we are working to light up new scenarios in Azure’s Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge. We have expanded the Azure Stack family portfolio and Azure Stack has been renamed to Azure Stack Hub, underscoring the central role of Azure Stack Hub in enabling edge scenarios. We are building on the core foundational Azure Stack Hub features, bringing new Azure Stack Hub services, and expanding the range of application patterns.

I am thrilled to share Intelligent Edge patterns and how the Azure Stack family of solutions is bringing value to our partners in new and exciting scenarios. These patterns build and draw on the experiences of creating value for our customers by building the Intelligent Cloud.

Building on the core foundational Azure Stack Hub features

N-Series VM Support for Azure Stack Hub

Enabling graphics virtual workstations, AI and compute workloads scenarios has been a very requested feature from our Azure Stack Hub customers. Starting in January 2020, Azure Stack Hub customers will be able to participate in the N-Series public preview.  Aligning with Azure for consistency, preview customers will be able to select between NVIDIA V100 GPUs, primarily for deep/machine learning, training, inference and HPC visualization workloads, AMD MI25 GPUs for desktop experiences, and support for NVIDIA T4 GPUs will also be included. In partnership with these preview customers, Microsoft and its solution partners will work to build and refine the solution patterns that will make all customers successful when they require the additional capabilities of what GPU enhanced VMs can offer. If you are interested in the preview, please see https://aka.ms/azurestackhubgpupreview.

Bringing Azure Services to the Azure Stack Hub

Kubernetes clusters on Azure Stack Hub using AKS engine available today

We are announcing the general availability of AKS engine on Azure Stack Hub.  You can now easily provision Azure-consistent Kubernetes clusters on Azure Stack Hub using the same engine used to automate the creation, update, and scaling of Kubernetes clusters in AKS.  Additionally, the clusters include a certified Kubernetes Cloud Provider which leverages the ARM (Azure Resource Manager) running on Azure Stack Hub to create and configure the cloud network and storage resources on-demand. All of these capabilities are fully supported in environments which are connected to the Internet or completely disconnected. Support for Windows container preview will be coming later this year.

Introducing Event Hubs on Azure Stack public preview

In an effort to broaden our hybrid cloud scenarios, at Ignite 2019 we are announcing the availability of the public preview of Even Hubs on Azure Stack by early 2020 (January/February). Event Hubs on Azure Stack will allow you to realize new Hybrid cloud scenarios and implement streaming or event-based solutions for on-premises and Azure cloud processing. With this preview you will enjoy popular features such as Kafka protocol support, rich set of client SDKs, and virtually 100% feature parity when compared to Azure Event Hubs. Whether you are using Event Hubs on a hybrid (connected) scenario or on a disconnected scenario, you will be able to build solutions that support processing of events/streams at large scale that is only bound by the Event Hubs Cluster size that you provision according to your needs.

Public preview of Azure Stream Analytics

We are happy to announce the public preview of Azure Stream Analytics supporting Azure Stack Hub in a connected scenario via IoT Edge runtime. This preview will be available to customers in January 2020. Using this preview, you will have the ability to analyze data coming through Event Hubs on Azure Stack Hub and to bring it over onto a blob storage/SQL database on Azure Stack Hub in a connected scenario. You can now analyze streams of data at the edge either coming from IoT Edge/ Event Hubs on Azure Stack Hub and output the result to a Storage Account/Event Hubs located on Azure Stack Hub without the data having to leave your datacenter. This way, you can leverage Azure technologies from the Cloud to deliver a hybrid data analytics solution at the Edge. This new integration enables you to build hybrid architectures that can analyze your data close to where it is generated, with low latency and maximum insights.

Private preview of Windows Virtual Desktop

Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) is a comprehensive desktop and app virtualization service running in the cloud. Expanding the scenarios of WVD, we are announcing the Private preview of running the WVD Host Pools on Azure Stack Hub. This is a fully connected scenario, were the management plane will be in Azure, with the Host Pools running the actual workloads remain on Azure Stack Hub. This enables a hybrid scenario which could target scenarios around data sovereignty and data gravity. If you are interested in the preview, please see http://aka.ms/azswvd.

Public preview of Azure API Management containerized API gateway

Today we are announcing the public preview of Azure API Management supporting now Azure Stack Hub in a connected scenario. The self-hosted API Management gateway is a container that can be deployed on a Kubernetes cluster or in any environment that supports Docker images. This containerized API gateway is configured through the API Management service in Azure, but all the data and traffic remains on-premises within your datacenter. This integration provides you a unified management experience for all the APIs in your organization across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Bringing Azure Intelligence to the Edge 

Azure Arc

Azure Data Services with Azure Arc preview

Azure Data Services with Azure Arc brings modern cloud database management capabilities to Azure Stack Hub. Azure Stack Hub customers can deploy [Azure Data Services with Azure Arc] on Azure Stack Hub and offer self-service provisioning and management of [Azure SQL Database]. Azure Stack Hub is ideal environment for [Azure Data Services with Azure Arc] as it provides optimized deployment experience on an integrated platform supported by Microsoft and partners. Developers can use a wide range of resource Azure-consistent resource types to develop their applications, including databases, containers, virtual machines, storage, Key Vault and many others.

Azure Arc for AKS preview

Azure Arc for AKS allows you to manage your AKS-Engine Kubernetes clusters on Azure Stack from Azure.  This enables cluster administrator to configure applications and policy centrally and have them pushed to the edge clusters running on Azure Stack. 

Guidance for practical use of Azure Stack Hub

Foundational Patterns

Enhancing customer experience has been a key focus area and today, we are announcing the availability of a set of automated scripts that support key infrastructure scenarios to get Azure Stack environments production ready. This new set of foundational patterns and guidance, along with sample deployments, aim to be prescriptive guidance documents, templates, and tutorials that users can follow using third party applications to solve features that are not yet supported in Azure Stack.

The documentation for these scenarios can be found in this docs page. The scripts for these patterns can be found in this GitHub repo.

These patterns provide alternative solutions to limitations that may exist in an Azure Stack environment as well as provide highly available scenarios for failover situations. The networking foundational patterns provides a modular script with GRE that allows users to create a site to site VPN between subscriptions, on-premise to Azure Stack, and between Azure Stack environments. The datacenter integration foundational patterns creates a file-share to extend storage due to finite memory on production environments. The external load balancer pattern allows for traffic to be managed across two Azure Stack environments. Combined, these scenarios allows our customers to become more efficient by introducing patterns that reduce these specific deployment process by over an hour thanks to automated scripts.

Hybrid Patterns

We’re working to show customers what’s possible at the edge and give developers the building blocks to get started developing at the edge. We’ve expanded our hybrid patterns to include the entire Azure Stack family and are excited to make available a new set of patterns and solutions, with guidance and deployable samples.

Today’s release includes patterns that show how to gather important retail metrics at the edge, and set up fundamental AI, networking, and DevOps workflows.

With this release, we’re adopting a new way to deploy applications across the cloud and the edge, using Cloud Native Application Bundles (CNABs). CNABs are a joint community effort with Microsoft, Docker, and many other partners to standardize how we build, manage, and deploy cloud-first applications. CNABs allows us to provide a cross-platform, consistent method of deploying complex applications that span the Azure cloud and the Azure Stack family.

To learn more about CNAB, go here. To learn more about Porter, Microsoft’s tooling for CNAB, go here. To check out our latest patterns and get started developing, go here.

BC/DR foundational pattern for Azure Stack Hub

Production workloads on Azure Stack Hub are dependent on a well-designed BC/DR plan. This includes the Azure Stack Hub resources (VNets, NSGs, RGs, etc) as well as the data which resides inside the VMs. At Ignite, we’re announcing the availability of a foundational pattern for BC/DR, which includes a script that will read all the resources in each subscription and recreate the ARM templates required to deploy the same, exact, resources in another Azure Stack Hub stamp. The data can then be replicated using one of our partner solutions (including Commvault, Corent, Carbonite, Cloudbase, MicroFocus, Quest, Rubrik, Veam, Veritas and more).

See you at Ignite!

At Ignite, the entire Azure Stack team is delighted to host all the partners, service providers, ISVs, and enterprise customers.  We welcome everyone in our sessions as well as in the Azure Stack Hub, Azure Stack HCI and Azure Stack Edge booths.

Looking forward to meeting you and hearing how you will adopt and implement these new patterns to bring value to you and your customers!