Preface

Microsoft Azure is the fastest growing public cloud and offers a comprehensive list of services, which continues to increase the list with time.

In 2013, Microsoft released Windows Azure Pack, which is a collection of Microsoft Azure Pack technologies and enables organizations and services providers to build cloud solutions providing consistent experience with one of the world's largest public cloud. Since then, Windows Azure pack has continued to enhance every quarter by adding more services and capabilities.

Windows Azure Pack, or WAP, integrates with proven Microsoft technologies such as Windows Server and System Center and provides cloud offerings including IaaS and PaaS services. Offered services aren't limited to Microsoft technologies as they offer a wide range of other vendor's and open source technologies such as Linux operating systems and MySQL Database. While cloud computing has already been a reality now and is no more a future technology, Windows Azure Pack provides a solid platform with extensible architecture to build a private cloud or service provider's cloud.

This book focuses on enabling readers to build a cloud solution with Windows Azure Pack. This includes a mix of design, implementation and management principles, and steps for building a cloud. Following this book, readers will be able to build their own cloud solution on-premises offering a wide range of services and capabilities.

You will learn about the following aspects of the cloud platform and offerings covered in the book:

• Learning overview, architecture, and capabilities
• Planning for service providers and Organization's private cloud
• Deployment and management of tasks
• Tenant or user experience