Benefits of the Azure cloud

Editor's Notes

• #2: The cloud is all the rage. Does it live up to its hype? What are the benefits of the cloud? Join me as I discuss the reasons so many companies are moving to the cloud and demo how to get up and running with a VM (IaaS) and a database (PaaS) in Azure. See why the ability to scale easily, the quickness that you can create a VM, and the built-in redundancy are just some of the reasons that moving to the cloud a “no brainer”. And if you have an on-prem datacenter, learn how to get out of the air-conditioning business!
• #3: Fluff, but point is I bring real work experience to the session
• #8: Objective: Establish that the cost reduction benefits that have come from virtualization are coming to an end and IT organizations need look to new innovations associated with operating services in a cloud model in order to realize the next wave of business value. Key talking points: Virtualization has been amazing technology for the datacenter, enabling efficiencies and cost savings through increased density and decoupling workloads from physical server hardware. But 10 years later we’re starting to run out of workloads to virtualize leaving businesses wondering where IT should look for the next wave of business value. For the answer, IT needs to look to where the business is investing. Research shows more business departments spending on so-called “shadow IT”; public clouds offering IaaS and higher level services through a consumer-style self service provisioning portal that delivers IT resources more rapidly and easily than using the internal IT department. Some organizations already recognize this threat and have chosen to create a new, more agile IT alternative within the organization. Looking higher up the stack, businesses are growing their investment in applications at a much faster rate compared with infrastructure investment. IT organizations need to get back into the game by looking to new innovations that support applications and services that drive the business forward. <click> The good news is that Microsoft has been delivering applications and services in this model in Microsoft Azure for several years and has developed a series of innovations from that experience. Let’s take a look at Azure today. Before virtualization IT was considered a cost center thus TCO was the most important attribute for Businesses Virtualization helped IT reduce TCO by consolidation and better utilization of Infrastructure thereby adding value to the business Most of the enterprises have optimized their infrastructure using Virtualization - 70% of all x86 architecture workloads are virtualized *. There is not a lot of scope left for IT to add value through virtualization alone Businesses now want to use this virtualized Infrastructure to power their innovation agenda and TCO, although still important, is second to innovation for Businesses. This has opened a door for IT to provide enormous value to the Business and become part of this innovation agenda This innovation is happening through applications and infrastructure optimization alone is insufficient to power this innovation Businesses are starting to recognize this. Spending on Enterprise software and applications is projected to increase by 7.2% CAGR in next 4 years as compared to 4.4% in overall IT spending -- that means software and application spending is projected to grow nearly twice as fast as overall IT spending Datacenters lack the ability to support applications based innovation 38% of IT spending is happening outside IT ***. This is projected to grow beyond 50% by 2017 *** “45% of CIOs have a second, fast, mode of service delivery that complements their rock solid operations”….from Gartner Symposium, Oct 2014 “38% of IT spend is outside IT and growing. Salespeople are going directly to the business - whether you like it or not”….from Gartner Symposium, Oct 2014
• #9: Why this Slide: You are trying to setup the struggle between IT and Business – you have to run a huge portfolio of apps, the business always wants more apps but you are struggling to just keep running what you have. In part this is also to cement that you are an expert and you understand their challenges. Key Points: Setup CHANGE is constant – you are being asked to do more with less Business Pressure to innovate IT Challenge of just operating IT takes most of the time/budget/resources Transition to NEXT Slide: How will you put yourself in a position to rapidly deploy new tech to drive bus innovation?
• #11: Why this Slide: You customer/audience is interested in Azure BUT they also have a data center to run today – you are trying to setup that you understand they have many challenges running their own data center and that they need help to do this that goes beyond virtualization – which was a good step. You also want to setup the Public Cloud and SaaS pillars because the combination of Private Cloud + Public Cloud + SaaS is THE Microsoft all up differentiator against ALL competitors. Key Points: You have a large DC investment – you have moved to a highly virtualized DC – but not getting all the benefits you expected You are looking at Public Cloud – this is the moment to cover the Cloud Business Model – (1) You pay for what you use (2) You can change your mind This business model changes OUR relationship – we have to make great stuff or you will stop using it AND we have to help you adopt and consume or our sales people don’t get paid – we are in this together…! SaaS is MASSIVE – lot’s of opportunity to STOP running app infrastructure – O365 and SalesForce – multi-billion $ businesses – proven..! Transition to NEXT Slide: So, how can Microsoft help..? What’s our strategy and how are we different to everyone else…?
• #12: So let’s start with the “What”. Cloud computing as a definition is simply represented as a style of using compute power and storage (essentially servers and disks) that follows these 5 tenets. Self-Service means that the end user can get themselves a server or some storage whenever they need it “Pay for what you use” means that you no longer have to purchase for your peak compute needs. What I mean by this is that normally you have to buy hardware and software for what you think you’ll need at your most demanding times. With cloud computing you get to ride the demand curve with tools like auto-scaling, and only pay for the power you are using. <Use Electric Company Analogy if needed> Multi-Tenant means that the provider, Microsoft in this case, has safe guards and security in place so that you the customer are running your applications on the same hardware as our other customers, but still virtually isolated from each other. This drives an amazing economy of scale and drives down costs for the customer. <ADD SOMETHING HERE TO STOP FEAR> Don’t’ leave it open for discussion so quickly Rapid Elasticity means that you are able to scale from 10,000 servers to 100 servers immediately if need be. There are people in your company that run batch processing jobs that take 50 hours to run on a 4 core machine. What if I told you that you could run that same job in 1 hour, using 200 cores? And only pay around $50 for that hour depending on the machine size? Broad Network Access means you should be able to access these services and deploy these services anywhere in the world, instantaneously This infographic is really a summation of the tenets of cloud. The major differences between on-premises are shown by that well-worn metaphor for hidden danger, the iceberg. Here what is concealed beneath the surface are the ongoing costs that traditional IT models incur. In the cloud ongoing costs are all contained within one fee and a single supplier with your other ongoing costs being around governance and people costs. On-demand self-service (IT still has to provision virtual machines for their internal customers). Broad, network access (this deployment is only available for internal customers on the network) Resource pooling (this is where virtualization fits, so yes, this requirement is met) Rapid elasticity (IT still has to provision VMs individually by installing the OS and software, and they don’t necessarily scale fast) Measured service (IT is charging costs back to other departments based on traditional budgeting, not based on actual usage) http://www.internap.com/2013/06/04/private-cloud-vs-virtualization/ http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-145.pdf
• #13: Virtualization does not eliminate servers OS instances. If anything it creates more thus adding to your management overhead. Cloud utilized as a platform enables your organization to innovate and respond quickly. It removes the barriers normally associated with new efforts and reduces experimental risk.
• #14: Traditional model - Empathize, land the case for change based on change in business context Take empathizing tone (don’t want to make this sound negative). We want them to realize that what customers have done may have worked in the past but they need to recognize the need for change as the business is changing rapidly. Most companies are running custom apps that are stitched together, they have purpose-built hardware to think about, and have specialized teams, and everything has been carefully customized (over many years in some cases!). Now as an enterprise, you did all this for all the right reasons, but you might consider that it might be holding our customers (and their business) back in many ways given that the business context has changed fundamentally. In this new age of apps, the old way of doing this is causing friction because IT isn’t moving as fast as business wants it to. This is manifested in developers not getting the speed and freedom they need to create the best end-user experiences. That leads to lost productivity on their side, which results in ‘Shadow IT’. In 2015, 42% of the technology budget resides outside IT; this will grow to 50% by 2020 (Gartner). So this is real.   And we all know that while Shadow IT behaviors provide immediate gratification, it comes with risk. Slide 8: Cloud model (Mark) – Empathize, ask customers to be change agents, land cloud principles. Now let’s look at the cloud. Everyone knows that the cloud offers agility and innovation. It’s proving itself to be the way forward for the modern enterprise and we’ll talk more about that in a bit. But for some of our IT customers, the cloud might seem a little daunting. They might be asking, “Is this something I want to lead the charge on? How does it help my career?” The tension some of them experience is because you’re not sure if things are consistent with what you’re doing on-premises and it seems like it will be hard to manage. There’s also a tension between developers who want speed and freedom (represented by business demands), and the IT folks who have to worry about things like security and compliance.   Bridge to our POV while bringing them along. Implore them to be change agents in their orgs. But make no mistake about it – the cloud is the natural way forward for the rapidly evolving enterprise. Let’s all embrace it. In this context, we’re already seeing some leading indicators around “bi-modal“ IT among you: 45% of CIOs have a second, fast, mode of service delivery that complements their rock solid operations” (Gartner Symposium, Oct 2014). So there’s already some great progress that a lot of you seem to be driving. This is do-able. And we want our customers to be change agents in driving cloud adoption in your orgs.   Our POV We believe that cloud is a model/architecture, not a location. (Cloud-first principles as in the slide) Turns out that Microsoft has been on its own cloud-first journey for many years and we have fully operationalized cloud-first in our hyper-scale datacenters. We’d like to share some of that next to help customers shortcut their journey.
• #15: Reasons not to move to the cloud: Security concerns (potential for compromised information, issues of privacy when data is stored on a public facility, might be more prone to outside security threats because its high-profile, some providers might not implement the same layers of protection you can achieve in-house) Lack of operational control: Lack of access to servers (i.e. say you are hacked and want to get to security and system log files; if something goes wrong you have no way of controlling how and when a response is carried out; the provider can update software, change configuration settings, and allocate resources without your input or your blessing; you must conform to the environment and standards implemented by the provider) Lack of ownership (an outside agency can get to data easier in the cloud data center that you don’t own vs getting to data in your onsite location that you own.  Or a concern that you share a cloud data center with other companies and someone from another company can be onsite near your servers) Compliance restrictions Regulations (health, financial) Legal restrictions (i.e. data can’t leave your country) Company policies You may be sharing resources on your server, as well as competing for system and network resources Data getting stolen in-flight (i.e. from the cloud data center to the on-prem user)
• #16: The ability to innovate is the primary motive for organizations to move to cloud. Cloud directly impacts your organizations ability to respond to shifts in strategy.
• #17: Cost savings are valuable. But even more valuable is the ability to shift those costs to strategic investments that enable growth..
• #21: Why this Slide: It shows we have a very broad platform. It about BOTH IaaS and PaaS, that these work together. It shows that we continue to lead in world class IT capabilities and that there’s really nothing missing. Key Points: We have already seen how the Azure Platform is IaaS + Pass – but I want you to understand that this is a huge number of capabilities – IT building blocks if you will. Every one of these blocks you provision anytime, self-service anywhere in the world 24x7. You pay for what you use, you can get more or less anytime and you can fully automate everything… DON’T spent too much time on this slide – you are going to DEMO (aren’t you!!!)… DON’T go through each block… Transition to NEXT Slide: Make the build go backwards to show JUST IaaS and then you will go to the demo to show it.
• #26: Why this Slide: Extra weight to tell the story of our unique strategy – IMPORTANT – you are not selling a product or even a platform – you are really selling a long term vision – and you have to sell this high up. Key Points: Don’t go into any detail here, don’t get drawn into any specific MQ MAIN POINT – MSFT continues to innovate – we are a true software and platform company and we have been doing this for 30 years (this is a dig at AWS mainly) We are persistent – we strive but don’t always succeed to be the leader (be humble, but land that we have long term horizons, we will be there, we don’t back away from hard problems) Transition to NEXT Slide: So let’s start understanding in more detail WHAT is Azure.
• #31: Why this Slide: This is the Key Differentiator – no one else is going to help the customer in their own DC, has a world class public cloud which is also a SaaS platform and has killer SaaS apps as well – Customers want all this – we have it. Key Points: Start setting the stage for what is Azure – very high level – it’s IaaS AND PaaS on top of a global DC infra – but it’s just software We can/will bring this software stack on-prem to help the customer with their own DC challenges We have killer SaaS apps that help the customer stop doing things – like running email systems. Our Platform is a platform for SaaS – if the customer is an ISV – benefits are building higher value SaaS service and/or keeping the “old” model of selling into the Customer DC… Position the Competition – Old Guard on left (IBM, Oracle, HP), Cloud Platform Vendors (AWS, Google) on the right only, Salesforce in the middle (only) – MSFT does it all. Transition to NEXT Slide: Summary – our strategy is 100% aligned to your strategy – but don’t just take my word for it, let’s see what some key influencers have to say…
• #32: Slide 17: The case for hybrid platform So why even build this hybrid platform? In one word – customer-centricity. Customers told us loud and clear – “We want Azure in our datacenters”. We heard the following drivers/motivations : Business requirements Summarize key requirements: latency, customization, sovereignty, Make cloud-first innovation possible everywhere So you can make app deployment decisions based on business need (vs. technology constraints). We will talk a little more about the innovation possibilities that this opens up in another slide. Finally, customers are finding that the alternatives they have don’t meet their needs (de-positioning competition) POSITIONING STATEMENT (all-up) For organizations that are looking for speed and innovation of cloud computing in their datacenter, Microsoft Azure Stack offers the only hybrid cloud platform that is truly consistent with a leading public cloud. Only Microsoft can bring proven innovation – including higher level PaaS services – from hyper-scale datacenters to on-premises environments to flexibly meet customers’ business requirements.   Based on the above, we have internalized that “cloud-first” needs to be fully enabled across on-premises and public environments. Ultimately, we want you to be to embrace cloud-first on your terms – every transformation journey is different and we want to be respectful of that. We want you (and your business) to focus your energies and resources on the things that really matter – i.e. the things that differentiate your product or service in the market. That’s really why we’re doing this work on enabling platform consistency so you don’t need to spend cycles attempting to do that on your own.
• #33: Talk about these points with generic customer examples where possible Latency – Talk about how geos like South Africa are not as well connected by dark fiber. Customization – For example, an organization needing deep integration with internal applications, systems,. Or wanting to use their own hardware. Data sovereignty – Data cannot be allowed to leave country borders – e.g. EU. Regulation – Local laws around how to transact business, public sector organizations, compliance and auditing needs etc.
• #34: Hybrid app patterns – front end in public, back end in private. Flexible apps: systems of record back end, systems of innovation front end. Great user experience can run on the cloud and scale with audience and interaction, when you don’t need back end to scale as much. 3M has a great story: Basically over a weekend 3M used Azure to build a simple mobile and Web-based solution that was integrated with their company security – that talked to 2 existing systems in individual datacenters – one from an acquired company and one from 3M. Why did they do this? So their sales team could immediately start selling products from a newly acquired company. App mobility from private to public (or vice-versa). App mobility: spikes can crash on-premises systems (Baylor University story) – scale as needed with no risk in the cloud. (Dream) Dev-test in public | (Act) Production in private. Avoid Shadow IT – why is it there? Because we can’t respond fast enough, the idea dies or gets done elsewhere. Now you can participate in the dream process and act on it. No more missed opportunities due to technology restrictions. Also this includes the Azure PaaS services that provide differentiated value while making it easier for you to dream.
• #35: Top-line positioning vs. AWS AWS fundamentally dismisses the notion of private clouds and by inference, hybrid cloud computing. However, most customers prefer a hybrid cloud computing approach, due to requirements such as data sovereignty, regulation, compliance, latency, business process customization. Microsoft’s differentiation lies in a deep understanding of these customer requirements. Unlike AWS which is essentially public-cloud only, Microsoft offers ONE consistent enterprise-proven platform – i.e. Azure and Azure Stack - that enable public-cloud agility and innovation across private, hosted, and public cloud contexts.   Top-line positioning vs. OpenStack Being a loosely coupled collection of projects, OpenStack needs significant integration investment with specialized skills. Unlike OpenStack, Azure Stack is a single integrated product, thereby promising deployment and operations simplicity. OpenStack has multiple fragmented and proprietary distributions – HPE, VMware for example - who are primarily interested in selling hardware and services. Despite claims of avoided vendor lock-in, customers are effectively committed to these proprietary distributions. Unlike OpenStack, Azure and Azure Stack deliver ONE consistent enterprise-proven platform that supports a broad choice of open source application platforms, languages, and frameworks such as Linux, Java, node.js, and PHP. Unlike OpenStack that is essentially limited to IaaS, Microsoft is also bringing higher-level PaaS (such as Azure App Services and Azure Service Fabric) to on-premises environments, thereby enabling rich application innovation. Top-line positioning vs. VMware They would like to have the market look at cloud using a virtualization lens. Microsoft’s fundamental belief is that customers cannot increment their way from traditional virtualization to a cloud model. By itself, virtualization falls far short of the essential NIST-defined characteristics of the cloud model, such as on-demand self-service and rapid elasticity. VMware can help incrementally optimize traditional infrastructure, but their solutions aren’t designed for application innovation. Modern application patterns necessitate looking beyond traditional virtualization that were primarily meant to solve for application compatibility and hardware consolidation. Unlike VMware, Microsoft’s offerings are designed for cloud-first application innovation; platform consistency across Azure and Azure Stack combined with a rich set of application platform assets (such as Azure App Services, Azure Service Fabric, and Windows Server Containers) make this possible. VMware claims that vCloudAir enables the same VMware infrastructure in hosted environments, but the reality is that they have a very small hybrid footprint that’s limited to IaaS scenarios, primarily VMs and networking. Unlike VMware, Microsoft has multi-billion dollar investments in hyper-scale datacenters; this enables a virtuous innovation cycle across on-premises and public cloud that also includes higher-level PaaS services.
• #36: Slide purpose: This is a product agnostic slide, it helps frame the hybrid cloud platform category – i.e. the notion of ONE consistent platform in a hybrid context.   A hybrid cloud platform has a standard architecture, regardless of deployment location (i.e. private, public, hosted). Due to this standard architecture, applications can be seamlessly distributed in hybrid contexts without making any code changes.   Summarize layers of the stack End user experiences Cloud application model Infrastructure/Platform services Cloud infrastructure  
• #37: Slide purpose: This slide does 2 things: a) puts a product-oriented lens to the cloud platform b) introduces messaging taking a developer, IT, and business lens.   Slide 19: Power of Azure in your datacenter. Let slide animate fully. Note that Azure Stack is born of Azure. Same end user experiences, same app model. Same Azure IaaS and PaaS services. What you see listed in the slide is the set of services that are coming to Azure Stack in its first release (or first version). On the infrastructure layer, we are making some translation – Azure runs on hyper-scale (each scale unit is 20 racks!) while you folks likely run a lesser footprint. So we’re doing some work to make this fit into your environments. Three main investment areas or benefits are Azure Services in your Datacenter, Unified App Development, and One Azure Ecosystem. We want to go through these in more detail obviously, but suffice it to say, this approach and solution builds bridges between all three schools of thought: business folks, IT and infrastructure folks like Jeffrey, and dev and cloud guys like me As a developer, I would be excited about… Application developers can maximize their productivity using a ‘write once, deploy to Azure or Azure Stack’ approach. Using APIs that are identical to Microsoft Azure, they can create applications based on open source or .NET technology that can easily run on-premises or in the public cloud. They can also leverage the rich Azure ecosystem to jumpstart their Azure Stack development efforts. As an IT professional, I’m going to be super happy about (moving forward in my career, pleasing my developers, etc.). IT can help transform on-premises datacenter resources into Azure-consistent IaaS and PaaS services, thereby maximizing agility and efficiency. End users can quickly provision services using the same self-service experience as Azure. IT gets to use the same automation tools as Azure to control the service delivery experience. As a business, you can truly take advantage of cloud on your terms.
• #38: Why this Demo: Make it REAL and put teeth to what you talked about. Just logging into the portal and spinning something up across the other side of the world is VERY compelling – remember this is VERY VERY hard for most companies to do today and even if it was easy – the BUSINESS MODEL is different. Key Points: Spin up a new VM from the marketplace. Show IBM/Oracle/SQL in the marketplace. Show Linux section Illustrate using the G5 in West US the business model and how the price (for a VM) is a combination of CPU/Ram + Features After creating a VM, open up your existing VM you are already connected to. Use that VM to connect to your Linux VM – map these to the resources in the Portal. Remember – YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE for everything that happens inside the VM – JUST like you are today in your own DC (plus you also have to look after everything that sits below the VM)… Transition to NEXT Slide: Now let’s go back to the Azure Platform Picture – we need to talk about PaaS.
• #39: http://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2015/11/redundancy-options-in-azure-blob-storage/ Geo-replication in Azure disks does not support the data file and log file of the same database to be stored on separate disks. GRS replicates changes on each disk independently and asynchronously. This mechanism guarantees the write order within a single disk on the geo-replicated copy, but not across geo-replicated copies of multiple disks. If you configure a database to store its data file and its log file on separate disks, the recovered disks after a disaster may contain a more up-to-date copy of the data file than the log file, which breaks the write-ahead log in SQL Server and the ACID properties of transactions. If you do not have the option to disable geo-replication on the storage account, you should keep all data and log files for a given database on the same disk. If you must use more than one disk due to the size of the database, you need to deploy one of the disaster recovery solutions listed above to ensure data redundancy.
• #40: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/sqlsailorcom/2015/09/24/azure-virtual-machine-blog-series-changing-the-size-of-a-vm/
• #41: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/resize-virtual-machines When a VM is running it is deployed to a physical server. The physical servers in Azure regions are grouped together in clusters of common physical hardware. A running VM can easily be resized to any VM size supported by the current cluster of hardware supporting the VM.
• #43: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/templates/
• #44: Why this Demo: PaaS is a strategic differentiator – but it’s critical to sell it higher up. There is a tradeoff with PaaS – you loose some control in exchange for the service doing a ton of work you don’t have to do. Key Points: Show your working simple web app + sqlDB from the Resource Group – a RG is a way to model and control all the assets that below to an app. Spin up a new Web App Go back to the Web App and scale out the Web Tier Go to the database and geo-replicate to the other side of the world THESE are all incredibly complicated things that today you spend hundred/thousands of hours and many 10’s/100’s thousands of dollars keeping working – WHY…? We have software that does that – it’s just better. BUT TALK ABOUT THE TRADEOFFS Transition to NEXT Slide: So that’s the Azure platform. Let’s look at some other things/concerns you might have – such as compliance/security/privacy and trust/risk.
• #45: By storing your data in Azure SQL Database, you take advantage of many fault tolerance and secure infrastructure capabilities that you would otherwise have to design, acquire, implement, and manage. Azure SQL Database has a built-in high availability subsystem that protects your database from failures of individual servers and devices in a datacenter. Azure SQL Database maintains multiple copies of all data in different physical nodes located across fully independent physical sub-systems to mitigate outages due to failures of individual server components, such as hard drives, network interface adapters, or even entire servers. At any one time, three database replicas are running—one primary and two or more replicas. Data is written to the primary and one secondary replica using a quorum based commit scheme before the transaction is considered committed. If the hardware fails on the primary replica, Azure SQL Database detects the failure and fails over to the secondary replica. In case of a physical loss of a replica, a new replica is automatically created. So there are always at minimum two physical, transactionally consistent copies of your data in the datacenter.
• #49: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/cio-insights/cloud-computing-what-does-it-really-mean-for-it-jobs/ https://redmondmag.com/articles/2011/05/01/the-cloud-vs-it.aspx