IT Camp Presentation for the Spring of 2015

In this wave of deliveries, we demo the methodology to build IT services with Microsoft Azure and migrate on-premises workloads to cloud as well.

Windows Azure Pack Express Installation

This is a project for Microsoft Virtual Academy that I had the pleasure to work with Shri (Shriram Natarajan, a Program Manager in Windows Azure Pack team) and had a wonderful time and learned much from him.

Windows Azure Pack, one of my favorite subjects on transforming your private cloud into a customer-centric IT as a service hub. The idea is to offer customers a solution platform such that they can self-serve on consuming, establishing, and managing IT capabilities including network, storage, and compute on demand regardless if resources are on-premises, deployed in Azure, or hosted in a 3rd party facility. The enabler, Windows Azure Pack, places an abstraction to present VMM-based private cloud with a Azure-like interface and experience, while integrating and consolidating at the middleware layer to enable on-premises, Azure, and 3rd-party resources to be managed with a consistent experience.

The first step in this strategic approach is to experience and asses Windows Azure Pack relevant to your unique IT environment. Which is what this project is about.

Essentials for Realizing Azure Baseline Costs

Subscription and Service Limits, Quotas, and Constraints (http://aka.ms/Limits)

This is a must-bookmarked page to find out, for instance:

• Total cpu cores a subscription can consume
• The number of endpoints a VM can have.
• The bandwidth an Azure website may provide.
• Total VMs a virtual network may host.
• Total TB per storage account
• Maximum of objects in Azure Active Directory

Azure Pricing Model (http://aka.ms/AzurePricing)

This is where to find detailed Azure pricing information of Azure services with options like pay-as-you-go, Microsoft resellers, and enterprise agreements. A good reference this is. Keep it handy.

Azure Pricing Calculator (http://aka.ms/Calculator)

This is a what-if analysis tool. How will the costs be different when changing your deployment plan from 3 small Linux VMs to 2 Large ones, deploying Oracle Weblogic server with A5 instead of A8, and replacing locally-redundant storage with geo-redundant storage? Just drag the slide bar on each category and one can realizing the combined baseline costs form the number shown under full calculator.

There is also a VM calculator (http://aka.ms/AzureVMCalculator) to better understand the cost implementations on VM, bandwidth, support, etc. with Azure Infrastructure Services.

Azure SLAs (http://aka.ms/AzureSLAs)

Do examine the SLAs from a cloud vendor including those of Microsoft’s. Cloud computing is emerging and the business model continues evolving. SLAs are not all created equal. Pay attention to the fine print. Understand what does and what does not count as an outage and when there is one how a subscriber is compensated. Following your flow of data, the overall SLA is the service with the lowest SLA along the path.

Azure Support Options (http://aka.ms/AzureSupportOptions)

Support costs will have impact on the business values of an application throughout the lifecycle. Not just the support subscription costs, but also the associated activities to initiate, monitor, manage, and document support activities.

Azure Compliance Page (http://aka.ms/AzureCompliance)

For some industries, if it is not compliant, there is really no point of investigating the cost of a solution. If compliance is a requirement, investigate early. For Azure, this page lists out all the achieved certificates. Pay attention to those referenced links like Azure HIPAA Implementation Guidance. Some specifically document the implementations for a cloud applications to become compliant.

Closing Thoughts

Cloud is about the ability to deliver instant gratification, and grow or shrink the capacity based on demand. Those days of rolling out a patch in 6 weeks, deploying a branch office in 3 months, building a cluster in two weeks, are long gone. The delivery needs to be on demand, in the next hour, within a half-day, or something relatively quick.

At the same time, cloud is not an one-size-fits-all platform. And there are legitimate reasons not to deploy resources in cloud. Get all the facts, learn how cloud works, and assess the risks. Know what you pay for, set a realistic expectation, then cloud responsibly and happily.

So where to start? Learning by practicing is what I recommend. For those who do not subscribe MSDN which offers Azure monthly usage credit, sign up a 30-day free trial at http://aka.ms/Azure200 and follow http://aka.ms/Azure101Series and http://aka.ms/Azure102Series to start making cloud work for you. Use Azure as your datacenter, your global networks, and your colossal storage drive in cloud.