The competition among the world’s top cloud providers is moving behind the firewall. The latest escalation came this morning after Microsoft Corp. debuted the first public release of Azure Stack, a piece of software that enables organizations to replicate its infrastructure-as-a-service platform in their private data centers.

The operating conditions of an on-premise implementation are the same as in Redmond’s cloud all the way down to the programming interfaces through which applications access the underlying hardware resources. That high level of commonality can drastically cut the amount of modification needed to migrate a workload from an internal machine to an Azure instance or vice versa, while also simplifying everyday administrative work. Instead of using different tools to manage their private and remote environments, operations professionals will now be able to orchestrate both through a unified interface.

Microsoft hopes that the combined productivity gain from the two features will make the hybrid model of combining on- and off-premise hardware more feasible for traditional enterprises. The vendor shares that goal with several competitors including Oracle Corp. and Google Inc., which partnered with a startup called AppScale Systems Inc. last year to provide a similar on-premise deployment option for users of its rival public cloud.

In the technical preview stage, Azure Stack will be unable to scale across multiple machines, so prospective buyers won’t be able to do much besides some basic testing. However, the situation will change in the foreseeable future, with Microsoft insider Ryan O’Hara having stated that a production-ready release is due to roll out sometime around the fourth quarter.

The launch version of Azure Stack will feature support for both Windows and Linux workloads as well as a variety of deployment options. Microsoft plans to give customers a choice between setting up the software on their own hardware using reference architectures from partners such as Dell Inc. and HP Inc., or buy ready-made appliances with the software pre-installed. And on the other side of the hybrid cloud equation, the company is teaming up with about 100 hosting companies in order to provide alternatives to its own platform.

The company will need to address the challenge of synchronizing workloads across internal and external infrastructure, which Wikibon’s Brian Gracely has flagged as a major pain point in hybrid environments. On the flip side, however, he expects the issue to pose an obstacle for the competition as well. 

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