As we know, deploying the new Dynamics AX will basically come in 3 different flavors. I wanted to explain a bit what this means and what I have found. The information here should be double checked together with your partners, and also with Microsoft. Also remember that it all is very fresh technology, and that things may change quickly as must is in early releases and preview.
- AX Public cloud – Black-box, maintained by Microsoft in Azure and it just works.
The public cloud “edition” was the first platform that the new Dynamics AX was released on. In the public cloud it is Microsoft personnel that is deploying and monitoring the instances. Customers and partners should have no technical access to the production environments. Data and code (like customizations) are created as packages and uploaded into LCS, where according to maintenance windows, and Microsoft will deploy them to the production environment. Customers pays a monthly fee per user, that includes licenses a production environment with high availability, disaster recovery and some sand-box environments (for testing and dev). The customer doesn’t have consider how to scale or what kind of virtual machines is needed. This is taken care of by Microsoft. Customers must expect to pay at least 110.000 USD per year in costs for this. It is my consideration that this offer actually is a very good offer, because it includes many of the services and licenses that we don’t normally consider when evaluating costs for operating a ERP system. I think than smaller customers (50-250 users) would benefit from this scenario. - AX Private cloud – Maintained and deployed by customer/partner, but still on Azure.
Private cloud is 100% running in Azure. Private just means that Microsoft is not deploying and monitoring the instances. In this scenario you will purchase AX licenses, and you will purchase Azure services and deployments. Basically 2-3 invoices J. You scale up the VM’s according to you needs, and it is your own responsibility. It is typical a partner that can help out, and you probably will have to purchase service agreements to monitor and maintain your Azure deployed instances. Will this be cheaper than the “public cloud” offer? If you compare apples with apples I don’t think so. There are many hidden costs, and if you sum up the costs, at least my internal calculations show that this offer quickly can be 20% more expensive than the Public Cloud offer. But the private cloud offers flexibility, but will demand a very knowledgeable technical department/partner. You can decide more by yourself within the boundaries of the Azure. I expect that larger customers (250+ users) would like to go for this scenario. -
AX On-Premise and Azure Stack – For those that have a datacenter to spare
Azure Stack is the new hybrid cloud platform product that enables organization to deliver Azure services from their own datacenters. You get cloud services, yet maintain control. You decide where to keep your data and applications—in your own datacenter or on others/azure. You will still pay for the AX licenses, but the you will also have to pay for your own hardware. There is one problem. It is not released yet. We are waiting for Windows Server 2016 with Azure Stack, and SQL Server 2016. These are still in technical preview. But for those (like me) that like to try out, you can actually download it from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/azure-stack/ . If you wonder what kind of machinery is needed, take a look her. (Basically 16 Cores , >128 Gb RAM and a few TB of disk). It will be a bit difficult to run the Azure Stack on my portable PC J. Also remember that there will still be lots of services that still have to be on the cloud. I assume that this option will be selected for large enterprises (1000+ users) and for hosting providers/ASP.
And remember that what I write here is not facts, but just my interpretation of how it can be.
Happy DAX’ing J
