Microsoft caused controversy last month when it said it would be revamping and also delaying the release of its eagerly anticipated Azure Stack hybrid cloud platform.

At its Worldwide Partner Conference last month, Microsoft executives went back on an earlier promise that Azure Stack would be able to run on customer’s own choice of hardware, instead saying the platform would only be available as an appliance from a select group of server vendors (Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Lenovo Group Ltd.). At the same time, they said the release of Azure Stack would be put back until mid-2017.

Customers were none too happy to hear about these changes, as is evidenced by the numerous grumbling complaints made in the comments section of Microsoft’s announcement. The general consensus was that turnkey solutions would be more expensive, and little improvement on the existing Microsoft Cloud Platform System.

Now, Microsoft has finally gotten around to addressing some of those complaints with the release of a new 11-minute video explaining its decisions. In the clip, Vijay Tewari, Microsoft’s Group Program Manager for Azure Stack Infrastructure and Cloud Platform Systems, said the main reason for the changes was to “keep the operations life cycle valid for customers”.

What this means is that the complete Azure Stack hardware and software package needs to be kept in sync with Azure Services as these are updated and new services are rolled out. According to Tewari, it wouldn’t be feasible to do so on “systems we’ve never seen before”.

Microsoft will provide Azure Stack customers with firmware and services in an “orchestrated manner” to ensure jobs don’t go down while an update is taking place, Tewari said. He insisted that it simply wouldn’t work if customers chose their own kit, even if Microsoft gave them a list of everything they needed.

Tewari explained that Microsoft intends to use industry-standard servers and components instead of “gold-plated hardware” for building Azure Stack appliances. However, he did hold out an olive branch of sorts when he said “maybe eventually we’ll let customers run (Azure Stack) on hardware they already have.”

Microsoft will be providing a first look at the Azure Stack systems at its Ignite conference in late September.

Photo Credit: mohanrajdurairaj via Compfight cc