Azure Stack vs Azure Cloud

Businesses are increasingly embracing cloud technology for augmenting their capabilities while keeping costs under control. Microsoft is a pioneer in offering cloud services with the now ubiquitous Microsoft Azure. The service has evolved rapidly to encompass a range of solutions that were hard to imagine a decade ago.

Today, the host of offerings under the aegis of the Azure brand are themselves differentiated to cater to the needs of different businesses. Azure is no more the one-size-fits-all cloud service that it once was conceived to be.

In this write-up, let us dig into the details of Azure Stack Hub and Global Azure, also called Azure for the sake of simplicity.

What is Azure Stack Hub?

Azure Stack Hub is an extension of the Azure services in the sense that it is essentially a hybrid cloud deployment that allows businesses to use Azure services on data servers outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. In other words, end-users get a subset of Azure services that can be customized as per the plans and offers of a specific service provider. Service providers can configure Azure capabilities on their servers and choose and customize the applications and services that can run on them. The only caveat is that the apps that are built and deployed to Azure Stack Hub must use the correct endpoints and must use PowerShell and API that will ensure that they will run on both Azure Stack Hub and Azure.

What do Azure and Azure Stack Hub have in common?

Azure Stack Hub is built on the Azure platforms and shares many of its features. It works mostly like the global Azure, only at a much smaller scale. Consequently, the underlying technology is the same in both versions. Some of the core capabilities that Azure Stack Hub retains from global Azure are

Running Windows and Linux VMs, web apps and functions.
Shared Containers, Key Vault, Resource Manager, and Marketplace.
Portal, APIs, and admin tools.

When to Use Azure Stack Hub?

Some businesses require hybrid cloud capabilities for customer-facing and internal line-of-business applications. The requirement of a hybrid solution may arise due to various factors like connectivity issues, latency, and compliance issues. Under such circumstances, Azure Stack Hub might be useful in the following ways:

Data from places like factory floors and mine shafts where internet connectivity is poor can be processed in Azure Stack Hub and can be later analyzed on Azure.
Applications that require to meet strict regulatory compliance like the ones in finance and healthcare can be deployed on-premises with Azure Stack Hub.
Standardizing DevOps processes on cloud and on-premises for updating and modernizing apps.

Differences Between Azure vs Azure Stack Hub

The fundamental differences between Azure and Azure Stack Hub are in the way the two are operated. Below are some of the differentiating factors.

While global Azure is operated by Microsoft, an organization or service provider operates Azure Stack Hub.
While Azure products remain standardized and vary only with regions, the services offered as a part of Azure Stack Hub vary with the vendor.
The endpoints and URL also vary based on what the vendor provides.

Apart from these differences, Azure Stack Hub supports only specific versions of namespaces, resources, and APIs. Similarly, there are limitations to regions and resource groups with Azure Stack Hub.