Solution design

Before starting to plan Azure Stack, an important requirement needs to be defined, and you, as the administrator or the person responsible for the project, should ask yourself the following question:

What is my cloud offering with Azure Stack? If we set up Azure Stack, it'll be there, but no services will be available if you do not define them beforehand. To be more clear, it is even important to know the offerings before starting the planning phase. A lot of the aspects of an offering change the deployment itself a little; for example, if you do not plan to offer Database as a Service (DBaaS), why should you plan for the SQL resource provider (SQL bridging resource provider)? Therefore, the most important thing is to define your offerings before starting with the deployment. A lot of people fear writing hundreds of pages before planning the first steps which may take days. From my experiences, this is completely different: the goal is to have one document per offering, with a two-page maximum. This will then be the basis for implementation as a service in Azure Stack using Scrum sprints.

Basically, Scrum is a project-management model for agile software development, but it is easy to transfer it to other projects, too. Based on the solution's design documents, each offering can be set up as a Scrum sprint and can be implemented that way. The goal is to make sure everybody does their best to fulfill their daily tasks without major interferences or collisions. With other project-management solutions, the huge issue for the project's team members is, in general, that there is no time for their daily tasks, and they will have to work overtime to make the project work properly.

Scrum tries to be as flexible and agile, so each project member can decide how much of their working time they are able to spend on the project that week. This will be decided at the beginning of the weekly sprint plans.

The following questions should be answered per cloud offering:

• What is the offering description for your customer?
• What components does the offering consist of (for example, compute, storage, and network)?
• Which other offerings are required to deploy this service?
• For which customers are you planning to offer the service?
• Do we need an RBAC within the offering? If yes, how do we need to set it up?
• What's the process to order it?
• What are the inputs and the outputs of the offering?
• What optional services could be added to the offering from a customer's perspective?
• Do we need a specific compliance for the offering?
• How much does it cost and, based on which item, do we charge it (for example, per user, per device, per hour, or per server)?

Most customers start with the following offerings as version 1 and later on keep adding additional services:

• Virtual machines (for Windows Server 2016 and 2012 R2 only)
• SQL Database as a Service (with Microsoft SQL Server only)
• Born-in-the-cloud web apps
• Cloud Foundry