Windows Azure vs Windows Azure Pack

Top 5 reasons for choosing Windows Azure Pack on-premise cloud for Enterprise

Monday, February 10, 2014

While trying to put together a comparison between Windows Azure Pack and Windows Azure, I ended up with a table listed below which doesn’t seem to be very useful. Instead let us see when would someone choose Windows Azure Pack Cloud installation on premise vs. onboarding simply to Windows Azure public cloud.

Some of the reasons to choose in-house Windows Azure Pack cloud for an enterprise are:

Compliance and Policies

High business impact applications and data has to remain in-house due to company policy
Internal only application mandate

Security Concerns

Afraid of data going through internet
It feels secured to keep the data inside the perimeter and don’t want to take a chance

Consolidate existing in-house resources

Millions of dollars are spent in maintaining clusters of servers for various divisions and teams in an enterprise, most of them often being under utilized at various stages
WAP provides an opportunity to bring them all under one administration by moving them to Virtual Machines and Services managed from one central portal
SQL Servers, IIS Web Servers, Services on Virtual Machines etc. can be consolidated and pooled to serve more needs with the same amount of resource and also cuts ongoing management costs and process overheads
Leverage existing hardware and software to provide modern cloud features such as easy scalability, high availability and flexibility

Self-Service & Agility

With WAP, development teams can procure resources as easy as a single click from WAP Self-service tenant portal
Long gone are the process to get approvals, waiting for setup etc.
IT administrators can increase the capacity as need grows seamlessly without end user impact
Un-used resources can be scaled down easily and let it available for other projects and teams
When there is a need to increase the scale, WAP portal provides single click scale out. No lengthy process and dialogs with admins when your application is trying hard to serve
With self-services comes responsibility and having proper gates. WAP enables IT administrators to set Quotas and monitor usage via WAP admin portal
This specific point is mainly applies when comparing with traditional IT process for procuring and allocating resources, not necessarily with Windows Azure. As Windows Azure also provides same agility and flexibility.

Transparency, Visibility and Collaboration

Windows Azure Pack admin Portal shows all the applications, servers and their users transparently for the IT administrators
In-house applications, their usage are made discoverable, easy to consume and visible for anyone in the organization
Windows Azure Portal being the central place for administrators and developers serves as a place for collaboration. Teams can discover another teams web applications or other resources easily. If a team or project depends on certain application, it is now so much easier to monitor the dependent services, talk to their owners etc.

	Windows Azure Pack Cloud	Windows Azure Cloud
Hardware	Yours	Microsoft's
HW Profiles	Customizable	Standard SKUs only
Software	Your Licenses	Most licenses included as long as you are provisioned
Location	Your premises	Microsoft Datacenters across the globe
Security	Full Control for You	Goes over the internet (!)
Management	Your IT	Microsoft
IT Administrator Portal	Yes	No
Self Service User Portal	Yes	Yes
Leverage existing in-house infrastructure investment	Yes	No
Custom Billing for your users	Yes	No
Central Usage Monitoring	Yes	Not Really. Without an administrator portal, hard to see resources utilized across divisions and teams.
Infrastructure Capacity Increase	Your schedule	Supposedly elastic, but limited by Microsoft's schedules
Scalability	Yes	Yes
Developer Experience	Consistent with Windows Azure	Consistent with Windows Azure Pack
Tools and APIs	Consistent with Windows Azure	Command line tools, Visual Studio Integration, Power Shell, REST APIS - consistent with Windows Azure Pack
White labeling	Yes	No
Target Audience	Enterprises and Hosting Service Providers	For anybody from Startup developers to SMBs to Enterprises. Compete for other hosting providers.
3rd Party Services	Portal is Extensible to include additional services	Azure Market place has some services, but portal is fixed.
Compliances	You maintain	Microsoft has some compliances met and continues to meet more of them
Supported Application Workload	Web, Database, Messaging	Web, Database, Messaging
Available services	Virtual Machine Database Websites Service Bus	Virtual Machine Database Websites Service Bus Blob and Table Store And much more…
Update Frequency	Less often as this is a box product.	At any point some service update keeps happening in a given data center.
SLA	If setup per recommendation at par with Windows Azure.	Each service has its SLA and refunds provided usually when not met.
Setup and Installation	Free download. Complex environments might take time to setup.	No setup needed, Azure is always ON

Portal Comparison:

Windows Azure tenant portal:

Windows Azure Pack Tenant Portal:

Microsoft strives to provide consistent User Interface experience between its public Windows Azure cloud and Windows Azure Pack cloud targeting enterprises and hosting services providers. Consistency is maintained not only in the UI, but at the API layer and tool sets work across both clouds.

Windows Azure has faster release cadence and much more rich set of services compared to Windows Azure Pack. Windows Azure evolves faster with market movement and new services keep popping up. Windows Azure Pack with its comparatively less number of services still delivers a stellar value add for enterprises planning to move out of traditional IT operations to modern enterprise cloud operations catering to the modern business and development needs. Windows Azure Pack helps enterprise IT to embrace the cloud, while still having control and insight.

Note: If you would like more in depth analysis on certain topics on Windows Azure Pack or Windows Azure, please mention it in the comments and we will cover it in the next post.

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Tags: Private Cloud , WAP , Windows Azure Pack , Windows Azure , Enterprise Cloud , System Center , Katal