Azure Stack Hub is a hybrid cloud computing solution developed by Microsoft. It allows organizations to build and deploy cloud-based applications and services and leverage Azure infrastructure in their own data centers.
At its core, Azure Stack Hub is an extension of Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, allowing organizations to create and manage Azure services within their own infrastructure. This can be particularly useful for businesses that have strict compliance or regulatory requirements that prevent them from using public cloud services or for organizations that have a need for low latency or offline operations.
Azure Stack Hub offers a consistent and familiar development and management experience as Azure, including a range of tools and services, such as virtual machines, storage, and networking capabilities. It also offers hybrid cloud features such as unified application development, deployment, and management experience, which allows developers to build applications that span both on-premises and cloud environments.
This is part of a series of articles about Azure Storage.
Azure Stack is a hybrid cloud platform that allows organizations to run Azure services on-premises, providing a consistent set of tools and processes for building and deploying applications in the cloud and on-premises. Here's how Azure Stack works:
Azure Stack Hub offers a number of benefits, including:
As an Azure offering, Stack Hub has a pay-as-you-go pricing model. You can run infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) on Azure Stack without upfront costs using the same subscription and Azure billing tools. Here's a pricing table for some of the Azure Stack Hub services:
| Service | Pricing | Description |
| Base VMs | $6 per vCPU per month | General purpose virtual machines with a base configuration |
| Windows Server VMs | $34 per vCPU per month | Virtual machines running the Windows Server operating system |
| Blob storage | $0.006 per GB per month | Unstructured data storage for documents, images, videos, and more |
| Queue and table storage | $0.018 per GB per month | Storage for large-scale messaging and structured data |
| Unmanaged disks | $0.011 per GB per month | Durable, low-cost storage for virtual machines |
| Managed disks | From $0.385 to $10.24 per disk per month | Durable, highly available disk storage for web apps, API apps, and functions. Pricing varies based on the size of the disk (M4, M6, M10, M15, M20, M30) |
| Application Services | $42 per vCPU per month | Storage for web applications, API applications, and functions |
| Event hubs | $0.2688 per core per hour | Large-scale event streaming |
When implementing a Stack Hub solution, the hardware configurations will directly impact your cloud’s capacity. It’s important to make the right decisions for provisioning CPU, memory, and servers, but it can be challenging to determine the usable storage and computing capacity.
Azure Stack Hub’s converged configuration lets you share physical devices for storage. You can share the infrastructure, temporary VM storage, and supporting storage for blobs, queues, and tables. It’s also important to consider the storage capacity consumed by the operating system, dumps, logs, and other infrastructure needs. The local storage capacity is handled separately from the storage devices you manage under a Storage Spaces Direct configuration. Other devices reside in the same storage capacity pool regardless of scale.
There are two types of devices:
Azure Stack Hub allocates and handles storage capacity automatically, so you don’t have to make configuration decisions. The Stack Hub infrastructure ensures these decisions align with your solution’s requirements, considering resiliency.
An operator can choose between two storage configurations:
Stack Hub supports a subset of the VM sizes available on Azure. Resource limits help prevent overconsumption at the local and service levels. For example, bandwidth limits govern networking egress (outbound data transfer) from VMs.
Stack Hub’s placement engine distributes tenants (VMs) across multiple hosts to ensure high availability. VM placement involves two considerations: whether the host has sufficient memory for the VM, and whether the VMs are part of a scale set or availability set:
Related content: Read our guide to Azure high availability architecture
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP capacity can scale into the petabytes, and it supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps, or any other enterprise workload, with a strong set of features including high availability, data protection, storage efficiencies, Kubernetes integration, and more.
Cloud Volumes ONTAP is part of NetApp BlueXP, a UI and APIs for storage management, automation, and orchestration, supporting hybrid & multi-cloud architectures.