Microsoft made available the first technical preview of its new Microsoft Azure Stack offering today.  It was announced last week.  Azure Stack brings the cloud model of computing to every datacenter – your own private cloud.  Azure Stack is a new hybrid cloud platform product that enables organizations to deliver Azure services from their own datacenter in a way that is consistent with Azure.  You can download it now, but first check out the hardware and deployment requirements.  Once installed, check out the Tools and PaaS services for Azure Stack which will be updated frequently.  If you run into any issues and need help, or if you’d like to provide feedback or make requests, visit the Azure Stack forum.

Also released is a whitepaper providing more information on key Azure Stack concepts and capabilities that should help you gain a much richer understanding of Microsoft’s approach.  Check out the full documentation.

On February 3, Mark Russinovich and Jeffrey Snover demonstrated Azure Stack in a webcast, followed by a question and answer session.  Also check out An early look at Azure Stack and what it means for IT, with Jeffrey Snover.

Azure Stack essentially is Microsoft’s better bridge to using its cloud services, both the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) kinds.  It uses the same code as Azure.  Scripting tools for management, such as PowerShell and command-line interfaces, will work across Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services as well as local datacenter implementations of Azure Stack.  This allows a company to build a private cloud, and then easily migrate parts to a public cloud, allowing you to have a true hybrid cloud platform.  Microsoft is the only company to have both a private and public cloud option.

General availability is scheduled for Q4 of this year, but some services will only be in preview at that time:

More info:

First Microsoft Azure Stack Preview Sees Daylight

Microsoft readies first technical preview of Azure Stack hybrid-cloud bundle

Microsoft Azure Stack: Hardware requirements