More and more we hear from our customers that building hybrid applications is necessary for their business. While Microsoft Azure continues to be the platform of choice for building applications, Azure Stack and Azure together enable building hybrid applications. The consistent experience across both makes it easy. You can use Azure services from anywhere, whether at the bottom of a mine, from inside a container on a cargo ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, or from the top of Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in the Andes. Literally, you can run apps that you developed in Azure any place where traditional data centers don’t exist.
You can use Azure Stack close to your operations while using your favorite tools and programming language. Push your apps through dev, test, and into production with a single integrated DevOps pipeline.
Nothing illustrates the power of hybrid apps like the disaster relief prototype my team designed and implemented. This is a great demo of Azure services in a mobile deployment, disconnected in a remote environment. The solution supports data collection and decision making, and we can also see it being tested in areas such as healthcare.
Azure Stack offers capabilities today that make it easy for you to start developing your own hybrid solution. At the heart of using Azure services with Azure Stack are the Azure Resource Manager API profiles. API profiles provide you with the set of resource types and versions that are available across Azure and Azure Stack.
You can focus on creating code for your solution rather than researching which resource types, API versions, and clouds work together. Use API profiles to enable your code to work across the Azure clouds that support your specific profile.
API profiles are available in PowerShell, Microsoft Azure CLI, .NET, Java, Go, Ruby, and Python. You can create scripts and automation workflows that work across Azure anywhere.
Writing code is only part of developing a hybrid application. You also need tools to create your pipelines and to target Azure anywhere. Azure DevOps allows you to target Azure Stack.
Finally, you can find guidance on how to kickstart the development of hybrid apps. You can find tutorials on cross-cloud scaling, AI at the Edge, and others. You can also find the first installation of a technical guidance series, which includes sample apps that show the hybrid experience.
If you have not started yet, I highly encourage you to download the Azure Stack Developer Kit and review the resources listed in this blog post to get started. Be sure to keep an eye out for future articles about hybrid development! If there’s anything else you want to see, just let us know.