This blog post was contributed by the Azure Stack Team.

Following up on our announcement earlier this week, the first Technical Preview of Azure Stack is now available for download!

Today, we’re also releasing a whitepaper providing more information on key Azure Stack concepts and capabilities that should help you gain a much richer understanding of our approach. Be sure to read it so you’re fully up to speed.

This Technical Preview includes these fundamental capabilities to help you deliver Azure services in your datacenter:

Developer and IT professional experiences: Azure portal experiences for application developers and service administrators

Azure portal experiences for application developers and service administrators Unified application model: Azure Resource Manager

Azure Resource Manager Foundational services: Compute (Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Extensions), Networking (Virtual Network, Software Load Balancer, Distributed Firewall) and Storage (Blobs and Tables)

Compute (Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Extensions), Networking (Virtual Network, Software Load Balancer, Distributed Firewall) and Storage (Blobs and Tables) Core services: Subscription management (identity and quotas), role-based access control, metering and audit

Subscription management (identity and quotas), role-based access control, metering and audit Application components: Curated Azure Resource Manager templates and Azure-consistent VM extensions (such as Desired State Configuration and Docker/Linux integration) to help you jumpstart your Azure Stack efforts

Once you deploy the Technical Preview, you will be able to deploy and run additional Azure services. Stay tuned for the first set of PaaS services, including App Service (Web Apps) to come your way next week.

Also stay tuned for the updated Azure SDK, (which will include PowerShell support and cross-platform CLI support for Azure Stack) and Visual Studio 2015 support for Azure Stack – these experiences will be coming your way next week too. This is the new normal from our team and how we’ll deliver continuous innovation to help you operationalize the cloud-model in your datacenter.

Check out our documentation to learn more on how to get started and test-drive the scenarios this Technical Preview enables. Remember, you will need a single server to host this proof-of-concept environment. 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.



We’d love to know more about your experiences kicking the tires on this preview release. Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts and feedback. To help you learn more, Mark Russinovich and Jeffrey Snover will be hosting a webcast on Wednesday, February 3 at 9:00 am PDT – mark your calendars!