>> Hi, everybody. Stay tuned,
where Rob and I will be having a conversation
about cost management within the Cloud.
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Welcome to the Azure Enablement show
where we are having technical conversations with
Microsoft experts about some of the obstacles or
questions you make face on your Cloud Adoption journey.
Now, today we're talking about governance and more specifically
focusing on the resource management discipline.
To take me through that conversation,
I'm welcoming back Rob to the show. Hi, Rob.
>> Hey, Sarah. How are you?
>> I'm good. Thanks for coming on.
Now, when we hear people talk about Cloud practice on-prem,
we often hear the analogy pets versus cattle
and we should be thinking about a resources.
Is that a fair analogy and how does that
actually manifest itself within resource management, Rob?
>> Well, I would say that it is a fair analogy
and resource consistency is one of the,
I would say, most overlooked
of the Cloud Adoption Framework govern methodologies.
In the Cloud Adoption Framework,
we have five disciplines of governance.
I would definitely say that one of the ones that
around resources is called resource consistency.
That is one that I tried to focus a lot of our customers on
and really teach them about how and why this is important.
If you actually look on my screen here,
I've got the five disciplines highlighted or outlined here.
Resource consistency, like I said,
is around enforcing practices,
making sure things are properly configured,
and really helping you as a customer just
to reduce like your support costs.
The more consistent you are,
the lower cost or burden and it's going
to be on your team to support a lot of
various different types of resources in Azure.
>> When you're talking about a consistent approach,
I remember when I was managing on-prem environments and I tried
to standardize things like naming conventions and stuff like that.
Is that kind of thing that you're actually
talking about here as well in Cloud, Rob?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
What I would say is that first talk about it
with your organization around defining
what your corporate policy is going to be.
In the Cloud Adoption Framework,
we actually do a great job of walking you through how to identify
the business risks so you could have
that healthy Cloud governed strategy for your organization.
Things in your corporate policy may be naming convention,
it could be what regions am I allowed to build Azure resources in?
What resources are allowed in those regions?
It could be as granular as that.
That's how you have to start thinking about
it in all app approach from like you said,
just by naming conventions to
like things like just where you can place things in Azure.
>> It seems like there could actually be
some massive business risks for people
if they don't standardize a resource management.
A great example you gave where there was
actually deploying resources in the region.
I'm based in the UK and I may have some governance
around having things in the UK
and if I accidentally put it in the US,
I may be getting in trouble with the orders.
Is there any other business risks that
we need to think about when we're
talking about resource management?
>> Well, definitely making sure
that you're adhering to whatever compliance or
regulatory concerns or needs
that you need to do as a business are huge.
Like you said, of course,
one of the most painful ones is that,
you have a development team and
because we didn't have the right policies in place,
they were able to build the Azure resources
and different countries are
picking different Azure regions that you
may not be aligned with what the corporate policy is.
That's definitely a big one there.
But there are other ones as well making sure that
you've got the right policies in place for
maybe approved Azure services that have
gone through the right amount
of auditing through your corporation.
We'd never want to fall into a state where
you're deploying a service that hasn't properly
been certified or added from your security department to be
compliant before you've actually put
some production or customer data on, for example.
>> One question I do love asking you,
Rob and I've asked a few of my guest on the show now is,
when you talk to customers and see their implementations,
are there any common mistakes or misconceptions actually around
resource management that they make that maybe we could avoid
making if you can share any of those stories with us at home?
>> Yeah, I've definitely seen,
probably the biggest one around resource consistency on
the mistake side is really two-fold,
one like you accidentally put services in
regions that take you
out of compliance with your regulatory concerns.
Another mistake that I've seen with resource consistency is
that customers are too broad on
the amount or the different size VMs
that you can go ahead and build and so you
see running very like dev or
test workloads using very expensive SKUs,
which affect you in cost,
like I actually mentioned in one of our previous recordings.
Those are very common mistakes you
see around resource consistency,
but there are others as well as we dive into this,
just not, like say,
turning on centralized logging.
There's great ways to be consistent with your resources,
with the policies in place to make sure that
you applied the Log Analytics agent,
for example, to all of your VMs.
When the VM gets deployed, it automatically picks up its agent.
That way you don't have messes,
but you have monitoring blackouts because you are
blind because an agent wasn't deployed.
I've seen that and
those are painful experiences for our customers,
which is why following what the guidance that we put in
the Cloud Adoption Framework for
resource consistency is very important,
just to put those guard rails in Sarah,
bring it all together.
>> That's awesome, Rob,
and thank you for sharing those stories.
What I'm thinking about is,
as a customer matures and getting to put resources in Azure,
we see their architecture and how they design
their workloads get more mature.
For lack of a better Word,
do we see that same maturity happening with
resource management the longer that customer is using Azure for?
>> Absolutely, I would say that resource consistency
and the way they manage the resources is an iterative process.
Remember, Azure is a moving target,
we're always going to release new capabilities, new services,
new functionality and existing services
and when we release these things,
there may be new policies that you may need to put in place.
Luckily, though for us,
we've done a good job in providing a lot
of native tools to help you just bring these things under control,
Sarah, like ARM Templates,
Azure Blueprints, we've got Azure Policy.
Of course, as I mentioned in one of
my customer stories, Azure Monitor,
and even using Azure Advisor to
help just understand what's going on
in your environment and where there are
recommendations for you to improve things.
>> That sounds great and it is great to
hear that there are some tools that can help us.
If we wanted to get started at all
with this journey around resource management,
where's the best place to actually head over to, Rob?
>> One of the things that I would tell you to start with is,
go to Azure Policy.
Real quick, if you look at my screen here,
I'm in the Azure portal right now and I'm in Policy,
and I've filtered this just to
a specific subscription that I'm working in and I've got
some policies that I've put in place to help me
with resource management and resource consistency.
One of them, just to show you real quick, Sarah,
is allowed locations for resource group.
Let me just drill into it so you can just
see what this looks like.
First off, I've got about 62 percent in policy.
I do have some area where I could use some improvement there.
If I wanted to go ahead and actually use this policy and say,
add some more locations or build a new one,
I can go and view my definition here.
My definition is very easy.
This is a built-in policy,
you don't have to maintain this.
This is all out of the box for you.
You can go ahead and just find it in the definitions.
What this is really just looking for is a list of
allowed locations that I want to apply
to a specific resource groups.
If I want to assign this Sarah,
it's going to be pretty easy.
I just pick what subscription do I want to utilize for this.
I think it's going to default to the one I had selected.
Let me just pick mine.
If I can find my name out of it, there I am.
Then what resource group do I want to
actually go ahead and apply this policy to,
so that's just pick my AZ
security resource group, I'll hit "Select".
I can give this the name.
I could even give this name like AZ security RG,
just to give it something a little bit more
unique when I'm looking through my assignment names.
When I hit "Next" here,
it's going to ask me for one thing,
what locations do I want
to be allowed to use in that resource group?
I could say, well, in this case here,
I'm just going to pick a couple in Canada,
until it's just like those and hit "Next."
When I'm all done here,
I could just say Next one more time
and it will go ahead and create this policy,
assign it to that resource group
and then I'm only going to be able
to create resources in those Canadian regions
that I selected there.
It's a very simple example,
but definitely one that I really encourage
our listeners here today to take a look at,
to get started with resource consistency.
Another one, there's another built-in policy I set up for us here.
It's allowed VM or virtual machine
SKUs very similar to the other one that I just showed you.
Again, select your description,
go ahead to your assignment name.
But when you actually go ahead and
select your SKUs, you could see here,
you can uncheck all the ones that make
sense so that when you assign this policy,
say it's going to be to a resource group,
where I know I'm going to be doing some development activities,
so maybe I'm going to stay with like maybe
my A-SKUs or my B-series,
something like that that isn't as expensive as using things,
some of the D-series here that you can see.
I just made my selections hit "Next",
and then go ahead again and make sure
I review and create that one as well.
There's just a few different ones in there.
There is a right available built-in Azure portal,
just go to policy and get started today with that.
Last thing, Sarah, that you could go ahead and look at,
is we do have the Cloud Adoption
Framework governance benchmark tool.
It's really great to go through,
take this assessment, work with your team.
One of the areas that we're going to focus
here is resource consistency.
As you take this survey or assessment and finishing completed,
there's going to be a bunch of different
links that come out of it,
and if we go ahead and look just, for example,
for resource consistency here,
we're going to have some areas where you can focus,
understand your business risks,
and what can you do to mitigate these things
and you can learn more just by clicking the link.
It's a great place to start.
>> Awesome. Thank you so much, Rob,
for taking me through this today and showing me
the importance of resource management and consistency as well.
Now, if you want to check out any resources
or tools that Rob, mentioned,
please do help our description box where
we're going to be dropping the links to you always
and remember to tune into
other shows within the Azure Enablement series.
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