Ahead of the release of its new on-premises cloud computing offering, Microsoft Corp. is pitching a new training course for those who want to become an official “Azure Stack Operator.”

Azure Stack has long been touted as being easy to set up and deploy, but Microsoft now says that whoever is tasked with keeping it up and running needs a little more know-how to do the job properly.

“Unlike Azure, where the operators of the cloud environment are Microsoft employees, in Azure Stack, organizations will need to have people with the right skills to run and operate their cloud environment,” said Cheng Wei, principal program manager at Microsoft in a blog post.

The company said in the outline of its Configuring and Operating a Hybrid Cloud with Microsoft Azure Stack course that qualified operators will be responsible for “operating Azure Stack infrastructure end-to-end – planning, deployment and integration, packaging and offering cloud resources and requested services on the infrastructure.”

Azure Stack Operators are actually just one of four roles that Microsoft said is necessary to get the most out of Azure Stack. In his blog post, Wei also made clear the need for an Azure Solution Architect, whose role is to oversee cloud computing strategy, “including adoption plans, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategy, application design, management and monitoring.”

In addition, Wei said, organizations will require an Azure administrator, responsible for managing the tenant segment of public, hosted and hybrid cloud environments. The last requirement is for a DevOps specialist, who will be tasked with putting into operation the development of applications built on cloud resources and cloud platforms.

Microsoft said its training course for Azure Stack Operators is still in development, with a release date planned for Sept. 18.

Image: Microsoft