At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft unveiled a number of Azure-related announcements from enhancements to virtual machines to changes for Azure Monitor. Among these announcement were a handful relating to Azure Stack Hub.
For those unaware, Azure Stack Hub is an extension that allows business customers to deliver Azure services to their own datacenters, or alternatively, use them directly from a service provider.
In order to help with business continuity and disaster recovery, the Redmond giant will be making available a BC/DR foundational pattern for the extension in the first half of calendar year 2020. This will allow folks with systems in multiple geographic locations to use the provided pattern and enable both failover and failback for IaaS virtual machines in case of planned maintenance, disaster avoidance, or if a system is taken offline in case of a disaster.
Also announced today is the public preview of Event Hubs on Azure Stack Hub, which brings the fully managed, real-time data ingestion service to Stack Hub. Event Hubs allows for the streaming of millions of events per second - regardless of source -, the building of dynamic data pipelines, and the ability to immediately respond to any problems, even in case of an emergency.
In addition, Azure Data Services (via Azure Arc) is also available on Azure Stack Hub, in preview. Arc allows for the extension of Microsoft’s cloud management and security tools to any infrastructure, while Data Services allows for the extension of the services themselves onto any infrastructure.
Joining the services above, Azure Stream Analytics, Kubernetes, and Windows Virtual Desktop are also being made available on Stack Hub.
Stream Analytics allows folks to “deliver hybrid data analytics solutions at the edge.”, and is being made available in public preview today. It can deliver data streams from IoT Edge or Event Hubs on Azure Stack Hub, at the edge, being also able to output to a Storage Account, Event Hubs, or SQL database on Stack Hub without the need for the data to leave the datacenter.
For its part, Kubernetes is being made generally available on Stack Hub, meaning business customers can now provision, deploy and manage the lifecycle of their Kubernetes clusters with a single tool. There’s no longer a need to set up complex orchestration.
Lastly, Windows Virtual Desktop – which was made generally available in September -, has also been made available in preview on Stack Hub, enabling the management plane to remain in Azure, and the Host Pools – running workloads – to remain on Azure Stack Hub.