Windows Azure Overview for IT Professionals

Editor's Notes

• #4: Slide Objectives: Describe the various computing patterns that are good for Cloud Computing Speaking Points: There are numerous terms and definitions floating around in the industry for “the cloud”, “cloud computing”, “cloud services”, etc. Microsoft thinks of the cloud as simply an approach to computing that enables applications to be delivered at scale for a variety of workloads and client devices. The cloud can help deliver IT as a standardized service…freeing you up to focus on your business Cover the workloads in the slide
• #5: Slide Objectives: Explain the three established terms in the industry for cloud services Speaking Points: With this in mind, it’s important to understand how to talk about our Cloud Services offerings. There is a lot of confusion in the industry when it comes to the cloud. It’s important that you understand both what is happening in the industry and how we think about the cloud. This is the most commonly used taxonomy for differentiating between types of cloud services. The industry has defined three categories of services: IaaS – a set of infrastructure level capabilities such as an operating system, network connectivity, etc. that are delivered as pay for use services and can be used to host applications. PaaS – higher level sets of functionality that are delivered as consumable services for developers who are building applications. PaaS is about abstracting developers from the underlying infrastructure to enable applications to quickly be composed. SaaS – applications that are delivered using a service delivery model where organizations can simply consume and use the application. Typically an organization would pay for the use of the application or the application could be monetized through ad revenue. It is important to note that these 3 types of services may exist independently of one another or combined with one another. SaaS offerings needn’t be developed upon PaaS offerings although solutions built on PaaS offerings are often delivered as SaaS. PaaS offerings also needn’t expose IaaS and there’s more to PaaS than just running platforms on IaaS.
• #6: Slide Objectives: Explain the differences and relationship between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS in more detail. Speaking Points: Here’s another way to look at the cloud services taxonomy and how this taxonomy maps to the components in an IT infrastructure. Packaged Software With packaged software a customer would be responsible for managing the entire stack – ranging from the network connectivity to the applications. IaaS With Infrastructure as a Service, the lower levels of the stack are managed by a vendor. Some of these components can be provided by traditional hosters – in fact most of them have moved to having a virtualized offering. Very few actually provide an OS The customer is still responsible for managing the OS through the Applications. For the developer, an obvious benefit with IaaS is that it frees the developer from many concerns when provisioning physical or virtual machines. This was one of the earliest and primary use cases for Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). Developers were able to readily provision virtual machines (AMIs) on EC2, develop and test solutions and, often, run the results ‘in production’. The only requirement was a credit card to pay for the services. PaaS With Platform as a Service, everything from the network connectivity through the runtime is provided and managed by the platform vendor. The Windows Azure best fits in this category today. In fact because we don’t provide access to the underlying virtualization or operating system today, we’re often referred to as not providing IaaS. PaaS offerings further reduce the developer burden by additionally supporting the platform runtime and related application services. With PaaS, the developer can, almost immediately, begin creating the business logic for an application. Potentially, the increases in productivity are considerable and, because the hardware and operational aspects of the cloud platform are also managed by the cloud platform provider, applications can quickly be taken from an idea to reality very quickly. SaaS Finally, with SaaS, a vendor provides the application and abstracts you from all of the underlying components.
• #7: Slide Objectives: Provide a high level summary of Windows Azure and what it enables at a high level Speaking Points: What is Azure? Flexible Windows Azure is now more flexible then ever before Windows Azure helped pioneer the concept of Platform as a Service It provides a rich set of managed services enabling you to compose applications. We’re now making those services richer. With the June update we have now have enabled infrastructure as a service. Including the ability to host and deploy durable virtual machines in the cloud running both Windows and Linux Open Some of you maybe surprised to hear Linux at a Microsoft conference. Our support of Linux is just one example of how we’re embracing openness in a fundamental new way. With the June release we are supporting more operating systems, more languages, and more open protocols Releasing all of the Azure SDKs on GitHub under an open source license. Summary We believe the end result is truly a unique model You can now use both platform as a service and infrastructure as a service *together* You can now use the best of the Microsoft ecosystem and the best of the open source ecosystem *together* Enabling you to build better and more scalable solutions. Notes: Comprehensive set of services that enable you to build, host and scale applications in Microsoft datacenters Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.
• #8: Slide Objectives: Describe the three main feature components of Windows Azure that will be discussed through the rest of the presentation Speaking Points: Virtual Machines Cloud Services Web Sites
• #9: Slide Objectives: Discuss the instance sizing and costs Speaking Points:
• #11: Slide Objective: You need an availability set for a 99.95% SLA Notes: Without at least two virtual machines performing the same workload grouped into an availability set you get a 99.95% SLA.
• #12: Slide Objectives: Speaking Points: Windows Azure runs on datacenters around the world Enabling you to deploy and run applications and infrastructure close to your customers. Notes: Windows Azure services such as compute and storage are now available in 8 worldwide datacenters with an additional 24 Content Delivery Network endpoints. You can’t have a real cloud without a data center.
• #13: Slide Objectives: Discuss Windows Azure Country Availability Speaking Points: Windows Azure is now available in over 89 countries and territories. Anyone within these countries can sign up for a free trial or a paid subscription to use Windows Azure services Of course you can build and deliver solutions to any of your customers worldwide
• #14: Slide Objectives: Speaking Points: Blah Transition: Blah
• #17: There are default limits in Azure as follows: 20 Hosted Service Projects 5 Storage Accounts 5 roles per Hosted Service (i.e. 3 different web roles + 2 different worker roles or any such combination) 20 CPU cores (not instances) across all your Hosted Service Projects (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jnak/archive/2010/01/22/windows-azure-instances-storage-limits.aspx)
• #21: Slide Objectives: Discuss availability Speaking Points: For a cloud service, Windows Azure maintains the infrastructure for you, performing routine maintenance, patching the operating systems, and attempting to recover from service and hardware failures. If you define at least two instances of every role, most maintenance, as well as your own service upgrades, can be performed without any interruption in service. A cloud service must have at least two instances of every role to qualify for the Windows Azure Service Level Agreement, which guarantees external connectivity to your Internet-facing roles at least 99.95 of the time.
• #24: Slide Objectives: Describe the Windows Azure Web Sites Feature Speaking Points:
• #25: Slide Objectives: Discuss Shared Instances in Windows Azure Web Sites Speaking Points: Windows Azure allows you to deploy and host up to 10 web-sites in a free, shared/multi-tenant hosting environment. You can start out developing and testing web sites at no cost using this free shared mode, and it supports the ability to run web sites that serve up to 165MB/day of content (5GB/month).  A web-site running in shared mode is deployed in a shared/multi-tenant hosting environment.  Unlike the free tier, though, a web-site in shared mode has no quotas/upper-limit around the amount of bandwidth it can serve.  The first 5 GB/month of bandwidth you serve with a shared web-site is free, and then you pay the standard “pay as you go” Windows Azure outbound bandwidth rate for outbound bandwidth above 5 GB. A web-site running in shared mode also now supports the ability to map multiple custom DNS domain names, using both CNAMEs and A-records, to it.  With A-record support you have the ability to support “naked domains” with your web-sites (e.g. http://microsoft.com in addition to http://www.microsoft.com).  We will also in the future enable SNI based SSL as a built-in feature with shared mode web-sites (this functionality isn’t supported with today’s release – but will be coming later this year to both the shared and reserved tiers). You pay for a shared mode web-site using the standard “pay as you go” model that we support with other features of Windows Azure (meaning no up-front costs, and you pay only for the hours that the feature is enabled).  A web-site running in shared mode costs only 1.3 cents/hr. during the preview (so on average $9.36/month).
• #26: Slide Objectives: Discuss Scalability of Shared Instances in Windows Azure Web Sites Speaking Points: Windows Azure Web Sites allows you to scale-up or down your capacity within seconds.  This allows you to deploy a site using the shared mode option to begin with, and then dynamically scale up to the reserved mode option only when you need to – without you having to change any code or redeploy your application. If your site traffic starts to drop off, you can scale back down the number of reserved instances you are using, or scale down to the shared mode tier – all within seconds and without having to change code, redeploy, or adjust DNS mappings.  You can also use the “Dashboard” view within the Windows Azure Portal to easily monitor your site’s load in real-time (it shows not only requests/sec and bandwidth but also stats like CPU and memory usage).
• #27: Slide Objectives: Discuss Reserved Instances in Windows Azure Web Sites Speaking Points: In addition to running sites in shared mode, we also support scaling them to run within a reserved instance mode.  When running in reserved instance mode your sites are guaranteed to run isolated within your own Small, Medium or Large VM (meaning no other customers run within it).  You can run any number of web-sites within a VM, and there are no quotas on CPU or memory limits. Unlike shared mode, there is no per-site cost when running in reserved mode.  Instead you pay only for the reserved instance VMs you use – and you can run any number of web-sites you want within them at no extra cost (e.g. you could run a single site within a reserved instance VM or 100 web-sites within it for the same cost).  Reserved instance VMs start at 8 cents/hr. for a small reserved VM. 
• #28: Slide Objectives: Discuss Scalability of Reserved Instances in Windows Azure Web Sites Speaking Points: You can run your sites using either a single reserved instance VM, or scale up to have multiple instances of them (e.g. 2 medium sized VMs, etc.).  Scaling up or down is easy – just select the “reserved” instance VM within the “scale” tab of the Windows Azure Portal, choose the VM size you want, the number of instances of it you want to run, and then click save.  Changes take effect in seconds. [USE BUILD TO ILLUSTRATE]
• #30: Slide Objectives: Highlight the Windows Azure Virtual Machines feature Speaking Points: As you saw you can use both Windows Server or Linux You can install any software you want in the virtual machine. It’s your virtual machine You can also setup a virtual private network to connect VMs to your on-premises infrastructure
• #37: (SLIDE CONTAINS BUILDS OF THE NEXT FOUR SLIDES) Slide Objectives: Highlight Windows Azure Durable Storage and how it works with Virtual Machines Speaking Points: The other neat thing that we’re doing with Windows Azure now is making it possible for you to mount durable drives to your virtual machine. We’re trying to do it in way that it is very reliable, consistent, and delivers a high performance. One of the things that’s different about how we enabled it is that when you mount a drive either in the portal or in the command line we are backing the disk with the Windows Azure Storage system that we’re running in the cloud today There are a couple nice characteristics about the storage system. Replication One is that we triple replicate the content within the data center. If a disk ever goes bad that you data is on then we have two other copies of the data that we can work with and we do not have any interruption of service We can then spin up a new replica once we detect a disk is bad From your VMs perspective you never know that an issue actually occurred [build] So you get much more reliability and an always on experience even when hardware fails Notes: Mention that Windows Azure Virtual Machines are backed by a durable store. Let’s spend a few minutes talking about how this works.
• #38: Speaking Points: Another thing that is nice about the Windows Azure Storage solution is that we have support for Continuous storage geo-replication What this means is that whenever you save something in the storage system, in the background we can automatically replicate the data to another datacenter. We guarantee that these data centers are several hundred miles apart so that in the case of a natural disaster or a complete data center failure you can be ensured that a copy of your data exists somewhere else. You don’t have to set anything up to enable it. It’s automatically enabled by default. You can turn it off if there are policy reasons why you wouldn’t want it enabled. The end result is that you can deliver more robust solutions with even greater integrity
• #39: Slide Objectives: Describe Geo-replication Speaking Points: Another thing that is nice about the Windows Azure Storage solution is that we have support for Continuous storage geo-replication What this means is that whenever you save something in the storage system, in the background we can automatically replicate the data to another datacenter. We guarantee that these data centers are several hundred miles apart so that in the case of a natural disaster or a complete data center failure you can be ensured that a copy of your data exists somewhere else. You don’t have to set anything up to enable it. It’s automatically enabled by default. You can turn it off if there are policy reasons why you wouldn’t want it enabled. The end result is that you can deliver more robust solutions with even greater integrity
• #40: Slide Objectives: Advanced Monitoring with Systems Center Speaking Points:
• #41: Windows ServerWindows Server 2008 R2 and later versions are supported for the following roles: Active Directory Domain Services Active Directory Federation Services Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services Application Server DNS Server Fax Server Network Policy and Access Services Print and Document Services Web Server (IIS) Windows Deployment Services Windows Server Update Services File Services
• #45: Slide Objectives: Show the benefit of using Windows Azure virtual network, site-to-site VPN tunnel, and a virtual DC in Azure that is in its own standalone domain Transition: If you want communication from your corporate network to the cloud services, but you don’t want your Azure services to depend on the Contoso/CORP network in any way, then this would be another option. Speaking Points: Here you would setup an entirely new domain/forest and configure the Azure services to authenticate to the local Azure AD. This could have a trust or not with the Corp/Contoso domain/forest. Notes:
• #46: Slide Objectives: Advanced Monitoring with Systems Center Speaking Points:
• #49: In this slide I want to show you how easy it is to use System Center 2012 SP1 to take virtual machines that are running on premise and move them to Windows Azure. Using the App Controller component you can actually save to the library a virtual machine that’s running and then using App Controller you can actually take the virtual machine that’s been stored in the library and then move it to Windows Azure. We will do our best attempt to actually fit the VM according the capabilities that exist for Windows Azure VM role, if not we allow you as a customer to modify the settings of the virtual machine as it is moved to Windows Azure. We also allow the use of Orchestrator and it’s Azure IP to automate tasks against Windows Azure. And from a monitoring perspective we support or rather System Center SP1 Operations Manager allows you to monitor the virtual machine that is now running inside the data center. New Capabilities in SP1 Windows Azure IaaS features – disks, images (AC) Build runbooks against Azure (SCO) Copy VMs from on-premises to Windows Azure, and vice-versa (AC, SCO) Deploy VMs on Azure (AC, SCO) Backup running workloads onto Windows Azure (DPM) Orchestrate & Automate Windows Azure Service management tasks (SCO) Leverage outside-in view of service health (OM) Leverage Visio Authoring tool to monitor Windows Azure (OM)
• #50: Closing