Microsoft is boxing up a number of its cloud-based operating system components into a new Azure Stack offering that’s designed to be run in customers on-premise data centers. The new service extends Microsoft Azure’s application development and deployment model to any data center, be it a private enterprise or a web hosting company.

The Azure Stack is a combination of Windows Server 2016, Azure Pack and Azure Service Fabric. It is also optimized for the deployment of enterprise applications such as SQL Server, Exchange, and SharePoint. It all amounts to a new “private cloud” solution that makes it easier for developers to scale applications across their existing data centers, with the option to pull in extra resources from the cloud when necessary.

“This approach is unique in the industry and gives your developers the flexibility to create applications once and then decide where to deploy them later,” writes Microsoft in a blog entry.

According to Microsoft, one of the big benefits is you’ll be able to use the same application development and deployment techniques from the hosted cloud platform on your own terms. In addition, enterprises will be able to provide self-service application provisioning in the same way that Microsoft does on its Azure public cloud, while retaining control over what can be deployed and managing integration with charge-back and internal billing systems.

It’s a competitive play by Microsoft, because neither of its direct rivals (Amazon Web Services and Google) provide offerings for hosting your own service.

“With CPS, we took Hyper-V and Azure Pack and did all the heavy lifting to marry it with hardware,” said Mike Schutz, General Manager of Microsoft’s Cloud Platform Product Marketing. “With Azure Stack, we took our experience with us doing this ourselves and will deliver it on the hardware of customers’ choice.”

Microsoft said a preview of Azure Stack will be made available later this summer. In addition, the company has also taken the wraps off its new Operations Management Suite, a set of Azure-hosted management services that can manage cloud services running on Azure, Windows Server, AWS, Linux, OpenStack and VMware.

In what proved to be a busy day of Microsoft announcements, the company also launched a technical preview of Windows Server 2016, which throws in container technologies like Hyper-V containers and Nano Server, together with Azure Service Fabric to let developers build and deploy hyper-scale apps using micro-services.

Last but not least, Microsoft unveiled System Center 2016 Technical Preview 2 with new capabilities that enhance the management experience in the hybrid cloud world that System Center already delivers.

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