Microsoft Azure Stack in Atea Norway

Azure Stack is Microsoft’s new platform for private cloud and it combines infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) in a software stack that spans Atea’s datacenter as well as Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Both Azure and Azure Stack share a standardized architecture, including the same portal, a unified application model and common DevOps tools. It is built to be as close to the Azure look and feel as possible, but with just a subset of the functionality.

Atea Outsourcing Services (AOS) in Norway have implemented both the IaaS services and the PaaS services with the high grade of built-in automation from Microsoft, making Azure Stack a cost effective Hyperconverged platform.

AOS in Norway have been participating in the Azure Stack Early Adaption Initiative (EAI previously called TAP) from the very beginning 3 years ago. It was decided very early on that AOS in Norway should deliver Azure Stack to their customers to two main reasons:

1) Customers are curious about Azure and the capabilities it can provide, but they are not comfortable to put all the workload outside their country borders;

2) The strategic choice to be the technological leader – customers want to see that Atea can give them relevant advices now and in the future;

And now we are happy to have Azure Stack in production!

The built in automation makes it effective to implement and operate in the customer environments, while the customer portal has the same look and feel as the Azure portal, and makes it easy for the customer to provision new servers and services. And to make it even more appealing the pay by use as Azure makes it cost effective and easily scalable for customers.

Azure Stack is connected to Ateas municipality platform, existing customer-platforms and public internet. This makes it possible for all customers to subscribe to Azure Stack from Atea.

AOS are using Azure Stack in several ways:

• Selling subscriptions to customer for self-service (as Azure);
• Selling subscriptions to customers for self-service including Azure Operations services;
• Selling Azure Stack PaaS services to existing customers;
• Using Azure Stack as capacity to existing and new managed customer (fully operated by AOS)

The next steps for AOS Norway are to implement more services on Azure Stack by targeting customers with the offerings.

Services like:

• Service Fabric
• Container services
• Azure Site-Recovery support
• Azure Backup