Amsterdam, 24 August 2017 - LeaseWeb today announces the immediate availability of the Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) for free to qualified customers with the Azure Stack Beta program to help them prepare for a hybrid IT future.
Leaseweb’s Azure Stack Beta program will enable customers to begin working with Azure features, processes and APIs, risk free and on dedicated server infrastructure. Qualified customers will not be charged for the life of the promotion and will not have to perform any Azure Stack setup or maintenance work.
The initial location of the Azure Stack Beta service will be in the Netherlands, however, LeaseWeb customers from all geographies can join the program.
“Customers are expecting a lot from the future release of Azure Stack. LeaseWeb’s Azure Stack Beta is the ASDK installed and configured. This program will help customers understand it and see if fits their needs,” says Svenja de Vos, CTO at LeaseWeb. “We want the free program to help customers evaluate the solution to determine if it will help them solve their infrastructure challenges, and we are looking forward to getting their feedback to make sure the production product meets their needs.”
The Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK), the main component of Azure Stack Beta, is a single-node version of Azure Stack, designed for testing and development with the Azure APIs and tooling. See Microsoft’s online documentation for more information about the features of Azure Stack.
“We are expecting a lot of interest from companies whose core business is in IT and are developing apps based on Microsoft technology. The organizations are very much interested in the IaaS and PaaS layers,” says Svenja de Vos. “With LeaseWeb’s Azure Stack Beta they can re-think their architecture approach and don’t need a dedicated infrastructure team. Having Azure in a local data center is ideal for sensitive data location control, privacy and optimization.”
When the production Azure Stack is made available from Microsoft later this year, customers will be able to take advantage of the technology through LeaseWeb without spending time, resources and budget building the infrastructure themselves.
Robert van der Meulen, Technical Evangelist at LeaseWeb, says the Azure Stack Beta program will on-board customers to a real product and they consume as much capacity as they like for duration of the trial.
“With Azure Stack Beta you can play with proof-of-concept deployments, do development on the platform or test a migration and when Azure Stack goes live they can move to production,” van der Meulen says. “Customers can combine Azure Stack with the services we provide like bare metal or co-location and also with servers in their own data centres for a hybrid cloud architecture.”
Azure Stack Beta offers a range of PaaS and IaaS functionality that will be available in the full release. IaaS features include virtual machine scalability, customized and application-based VM templates, access to a VM template gallery, virtual networking features (e.g. firewall and NAT) and guest OS diagnostics and monitoring.
PaaS features include support for deployment of app services, including mobile apps, APIs, and web apps. Customers can also easily deploy SQL and MySQL databases without the need to setup and maintaining database servers.
“Azure Stack is not yet available on the market globally or locally, but is highly anticipated. ASDK is the first step towards the future Azure Stack and is already available as a product preview,” says Svenja de Vos. “At LeaseWeb we have made it easy for customers to take a free ride without needing to invest in hosting, configuration and maintenance. It will only take a few days to go through the evaluation cycle to get your Azure Stack Beta server up and running. We are looking forward to customers helping influence what we offer in the final product.”
Experience Azure with LeaseWeb’s Azure Pack support
LeaseWeb recently accounted support for Microsoft’s Azure Pack cloud solution, which enables customers to experience Azure technologies at no extra cost. Azure Pack is built with Windows Server, System Center, and SQL Server technologies to offer customers (and their subscribers) a self-service portal for cloud services, including IaaS, database as a services (DBaaS) and PaaS.