Hello from sunny and warm Australia! Unfortunately I couldn’t attend Ignite in Orlando this year, but got all the updates for you in a single blogpost regarding the Azure Stack space. A lot of updates to share now so let me dive in to it right away:
Rebranding Alert:
Azure Stack refers now to a family of products! Azure Stack as we know it is called from now on Azure Stack Hub. Azure Databox Edge is called from now on Azure Stack Edge. And the current Hyper Converged Infrastructure remains its name Azure Stack HCI
Azure Stack Edge New form factors and features
With Azure Stack Edge they now provide a ruggedized version of it. It also allows customers to run now custom workload on it using virtual machines or managing Kubernetes clusters. At last they introduced High Availability (HA) so now you can have 2 nodes act as a cluster where workload can failover between the nodes once one might fail.
Preview of Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure Stack Hub
Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) will be brought (partially) to Azure Stack Hub. The management pane for WVD will remain in Azure but customers will allow to host their Windows Pool also on Azure Stack Hub.
Azure data Services (Arc) (also) on Azure Stack Hub
With Azure Arc, customers who want to simplify complex and distributed environments across on-premises, edge and multicloud, Azure Arc enables deployment of Azure services anywhere and extends Azure management to any infrastructure. Read more about Azure Arc
GA of Kubernetes on Azure Stack Hub
Customers can leverage as of today the deployment of Kubernetes clusters on Azure Stack Hub. The clusters managed by the Kubernetes on Azure Stack Hub contain a certified Kubernetes Cloud Provider, which leverages Azure Resource Manager to natively create and configure compute, network, and storage resources for the cluster on-demand. It does so through an Azure-maintained VM image, so that developers and IT architects have a simplified solution for maintaining the multiple cluster nodes.
BC/DR Scenarios for Azure Stack Hub to Azure Stack Hub
Next year (mid 2020) Disaster Recovery scenarios will be introduced allowing customers to failover between Azure Stack Hub instances. This will include failover and fail-back scenarios.
Event Hubs On Azure Stack Hub (Public Preview)
Customer can kickstart with Event Hubs on Azure Stack Hub to have data ingestion from different sources and have them handled on their own Azure Stack Hub instance. Data can then be consumed by backend systems or stored in storage solution hosted on Azure Stack Hub.
Public Preview of Azure Stream Analytics support on Azure Stack Hub
Stream Analytics allows customers to have data analytics happening at the edge. With Stream Analytics support in combination with Event Hubs customers can have calculations done while ingested to the backend. These outputs can be stored in Storage or database solutions hosted on Azure Stack Hub.
GPU Support for Azure Stack Hub
In Januari a private preview will be made available for customers who wants to participate in GPU support for Azure Stack Hub. They are looking to support NCv3 (NVIDIA V100), NVv4 (AMD Mi25) and NVIDIA T4 Sku (TBD)
You can sign up for the GPU preview at: https://aka.ms/azurestackgpupreview