Azure Stack will need special sysadmins, says Microsoft

Microsoft reckons its forthcoming Azure Stack on-premises cloud needs a special breed of sysadmin to keep it humming. The company describes that worthy as a “ Azure Stack Operator” and says they will be “Responsible for operating Azure Stack infrastructure end-to-end – planning, deployment and integration, packaging and …

[mr. deadlift]

here's the part of the course / exam with the heaviest weighting

Understand how licensing and billing works in Microsoft Azure Stack.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you'll find that is a separate month long course, full of contradicting information. During the 1 month course, the content will change 3 times and even the instructors won't have a fucking clue whats going on.

[jake]

Well, isn't that special?

In this case, "special" is from the Chippewa word meaning "drop your shorts, we don't have much time".

(With apologies to Dana Carvey.)

[Adam 52]

That picture has a bunch of "devops" on the left. Now if you have devops people, why do you need operators too?

I think MS are right here, at least in part, but there will be an inherent clash between ops and devils around things like security and cost optimization.

[Adam 52]

Sorry, phone autocorrects devops to devils.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you were right the first time

[Locky]

Operationalizing?

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Operationalizing?

It's to go along with moneytizering.

[oldcoder]

Re: Operationalizing?

The latest in buzzword technology...

The short form is "give us your money".

[Pascal Monett]

"how quickly the certification will expire"

That'll be easy : every quarter.

Because Microsoft is operating on a rolling update framework, and Azure is as constantly updated as can be, after a quarter you're probably going to have to update your cert to prove that you keep up with the times.

[Anonymous Coward]

Azure Stack on-premises cloud

An Azure Solution Architect, an Azure Administrator, devOps peeps. Tell me again how much money I'm going to save by moving to the hybrid cloud.

[Not also known as SC]

Not a good acronym

AS oles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I missing something, or is "on premises cloud" both an oxymoron and showing just how stupid the term cloud has become?

The company I work for (hence anon) uses the word "cloud" because it has servers in two locations. It also uses "AI" despite the product being as dumb as a bag of rocks. It's great at what it does, but it's not AI.

I think I just narrowed my employers down to 90% of all tech companies in the UK...

[Tom 38]

Cloud is a state of mind? If we define a cloudy app:

* Stateless

* Cattle not pet

* Auto deployed and provisioned using some sort of assembly tool producing disk images

* Auto failover/recovery

* Geographically resilient

* Add your own qualities here

then our cloud is anything that runs our cloudy app. If we configure a rack with have in house to be chock full of openstack instances, that could be considered an on-prem cloud.

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought cloud means it just runs in a browser.

[oldcoder]

Naaa.

Cloud just means someone else owns your underwear, and knows everything about your company.

[GoldCoaster]

You missed:

- PaaS Services like queues, databases, IoT, Object Store, Identity

- Infinitely* scalable

- Consumption priced

An on prem "cloud" or hosting as I prefer to call it, usually can't provide these three.

[Anonymous Coward]

" It also uses "AI" despite the product being as dumb as a bag of rocks"

Well, whatever "intelligence" it has is certainly artificial...

[kelleyos]

The cloud is not a "place". It is an operating model. If you build cloud enabled apps you will need the same cloud services to run them in the public cloud or in your own private cloud. This is the purpose of Azure Stack and fits the definition of hybrid cloud too.

[vtango]

As customers start to adopt Azure Stack, we’re planning to offer a range of training options from instructor-led courses to free online trainings to give customers options to learn how to operate Azure Stack efficiently and effectively, and most importantly, on their terms. The great news is, most IT Pros have the base they need with their existing PowerShell, Windows Server and Azure skills. These courses will fine-tune those skills for use with Azure Stack. We’re also continuing to listen to early users and customers about their training needs so feedback from the community is appreciated. You can expect to hear a lot more from us in the next few weeks.

Vijay Tewari

Group Program Manager, Azure Stack, Microsoft Corp

[Trevor_Pott]

Thank you kindly for choosing to engage directly with the community. It is nice to see anyone from any vendor taking the time.

I do have one small question however: does the rest of Microsoft know you're doing this? You're harming their ruthlessly customer hostile image. (Well, not a lot, as the Windows team exudes so much animosity towards literally everyone that it's hard to overcome...but you are denting the evil overlord image a little...)

[vtango]

Thanks Trevor. We are certainly focused on learning from customers on how they want to use Azure Stack and what we need to do to enable them. In that sense we are all "Padawans":). Seriously though, we would like to talk with you if you are up for it and get your feedback. You can reach me via LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijay-tewari-2b34932/)