I understand that Azure is Microsoft's Cloud Platform that provides services through which you can deploy your application on cloud.
Does this mean that you can run Azure on your own datacenter like Microsoft is doing currently?
With the Azure Stack, you can deploy your applications on your on-premises (private) cloud, just like you would do in Azure - you're essentially retargeting the app. Our ultimate goal is to empower maximum application agility.
To enable the same deployment experience, Microsoft is bringing the same Azure portal, user experience framework, and underlying IaaS/PaaS APIs and services to your on-premises environments. We're also being thoughtful in which services we bring on-premises so that enterprise customers get maximum value.
We want to enable our customers and partners to run Azure in their datacenter in a way that's appropriate to their business requirements. We understand that not everybody operates at the hyper-scale that Microsoft does - as such, we will translate Microsoft's cloud designs and bring them to customers so it's easy to consume while enhancing flexibility and security in datacenter operations.
Will I be able to "burst" from on premise into Azure in this model? I'm in the process of deploying cloudstack/Ubuntu MAAS now for my on premise (and generally longer duration deployment) needs and using Azure for when I need rapid setup/teardown or a large amount of capacity (on demand).
If I could have one stack locally and in "the cloud", I would be VERY happy (especially if it's all tied in with AD, federated etc).
Key phrases: "enterprise on-premise data center" and "private cloud solution for IT pros and makes it easier for developers to scale their apps across their existing data centers and then boost to the cloud if they need more capacity on short notice" (emphasis mine).
The "Azure Stack" with those features apparently won't be available until 2016, however.
The only thing we could do is become better than Microsoft at reliability (hah!) and customer service (which there might be a shot at in the short term).
The real question will be what will this take? If I have to put Windows Server 20xx on my hardware to run the fabric, I'm out.