>> Good news. We're back today with
David Stanford talking about how to ask
the right questions about
your Azure workloads using the Azure Well-Architected Review.
Join us, we look forward to see you soon.
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>> Welcome to the Azure enablement show where we'll be discussing
the challenges you and
our other tech-savvy customers have encountered.
Together we'll be talking with experts
to find out how they think about these problems,
recommended tools and best practices and tips
they've learned from years of experience that you can use.
Today, we're going to be talking
about the Well-Architected Review.
This is the tool we mentioned in
the last video that will allow you to
ask the right questions about your Azure workloads.
To do that, what I'd like to do is bring back my colleague,
David Stanford, so we can talk a little bit about it. Hey, David.
>> Hey, thanks for having me back, David.
>> No problem. Let's just start,
I think a good place to start in the beginning is the beginning.
What is the Well-Architected Review?
>> It's a tool that we've put together to help
customers navigate through their workload
and really use it as a compass inside
our docs so you can find
the right recommendations to optimize your workload.
>> Why would I want to do this exercise at all?
>> Well, I mean,
overall, as we talked about in the last video,
you want to make the appropriate trade-offs in your workload
to meet all of the requirements that you have for your business,
and this really helps you identify which trade-off you
need to make and think about all
of the various different questions you might want to
ask yourself or a workload owner
to ensure that it's meeting its cost,
reliability, operational excellence, security,
or performance requirements.
>> Those sound really familiar.
Those wouldn't happen to be the pillars
of the Well-Architected Framework by any chance?
>> No, those are the pillars we talked about last time.
>> Cool. I knew I recognize them from someplace.
Rather than doing a lot of telling,
let's do a bunch of showing.
Can we drop into the Well-Architected?
>> Absolutely, I love that. To do that,
can you switch over to customer mode?
>> Cool. I can do that,
I have the technology.
Cool. I'm ready to act as the customer. Let's do it.
>> Great. Thanks, David.
Let's take a look at the assessment now.
As you can see on Microsoft Docs,
or docs assessments, we have a number of assessments available.
You can see three of them here.
Of course, we're focused on
the Azure Well-Architected Review today.
As we get started, can you tell me a little more
about the customer that you're representing
and some of your business priorities?
>> Absolutely. I think there'll be several in this video series,
but the one I'm representing right now is Tailwind Traders,
which is a online e-commerce seller of hardware.
>> Excellent. You know that I named it that way,
and the reason we did that is because as
you assess multiple workloads,
you're going to want to be able to identify
which one is which at the end.
We want to have a name there. Then what
business priorities are you focused on today?
>> I think the thing that's most pressing for me right now
is my Azure spend and making
sure that I'm getting all the value I can from
that money so I don't cost op, maybe.
>> Great. Let's take a look at the cost optimization questions
and we'll assess your workload and take a look at the results.
>> Great.
>> The very first question that we're going to think about is,
what actions are you taking to optimize your Cloud costs?
The options that we have available here are,
you've identified opportunities to reduce overall costs,
you leverage cost management tools to plan and track costs,
and you tag your resources.
>> I think I can safely say that I'm currently
using some of the stuff for number 2.
>> Cost management tools? Excellent.
>> Yes, please.
>> Then as you can see here,
each of the questions has a description,
a short little video that tells you a little bit more
about each question and the choices that are available.
Then there's a tool tip available for each option as well.
>> Cool, I think the tooltips,
I think they're super useful.
>> The next question, how do you ensure
that your Cloud resources are appropriately provisioned?
>> Okay.
>> Our options there are you
automate based on the application lifespan,
use DevOps and deployment automation,
configure on a scale policies for my workload both in and out,
select the right resource offering sizes,
and choose appropriate services
that match your business requirements.
>> I'm a big DevOps fan,
so let's go with DevOps.
>> You use DevOps to deploy,
because I mean you also automate your application lifespan?
>> Yeah, good point. I do do that too.
>> Excellent. How about,
for the auto-scaling, any [inaudible]?
>> Not much. No.
>> Perfect. Let's not read every single question.
Let's just do one more.
What more trade-offs that you've made to optimize for costs?
The things you might think about here are,
have you analyzed your ROI,
your return on investment?
Do you use different Azure datacenter locations to optimize costs?
For example, some regions are less expensive than others.
Do you leverage Azure Marketplace to get
third-party tools that may reduce spend?
Do you track the resource tier and optimize appropriately?
Do you take advantage of appropriate subscription offer types?
>> I'll say that I use the region stuff because
I'm a big fan of that also for the reliability stuff as well.
Let's look at that as an answer.
>> Okay.
>> Can I ask you a question about this?
>> Absolutely, please.
>> Where are all these questions coming from?
Like, did you make them up?
Where are they coming from?
>> To build out these questions,
we've collaborated across both our internal, external teams,
so we've worked with the internal field,
talk to Cloud Solutions Architects, Cloud Developer Advocates,
and then we've also collaborated with
partners to ensure that we're capturing all of
the information that they've identified as best practices here.
Then also we've looked at some of our own outages and some of
our own optimization exercises across
Microsoft to help ensure
that we're looking at all of the right things.
>> Okay, cool. Now what I'm interested in seeing is
what are the results when we run through this thing?
>> Perfect. Let's take a look at that.
I just want to have you submitted this and then as you can see,
we got our results here
where there's some room to improve how you're optimizing for cost.
>> Okay.
>> At the very top here we have a set of next steps for
you that help identify exactly where you can start.
Because you told us that you
were not analyzing your return on investment,
you don't tag your resources
and you're not doing anything with auto-scaling.
Those ones are pretty critical to actually reducing your cost and
actually identifying where you're actually spending extra money.
Without like, for example, tagging your resources,
how do you know which subunit
of your business is creating all the spend?
>> Yes.
>> Then further down,
we have a complete set of
recommendations based on the questions that you answered.
We skipped a few of the questions so we
don't have any recommendations for those.
Because by skipping, you've indicated that
that question is not supercritical to your workload.
>> I'm not penalized anyway if
I skip a question, it's okay to skip?
>> Yeah. Absolutely. If a question
does not make sense for your workload, absolutely skip it.
>> Okay. Cool. [inaudible] I was just going to ask you,
how often should I be running this?
>> I would recommend at least every quarter re-running
this assessment for each
of your workloads that are business critical.
Depth test workloads, for example,
you're not going to want to take a look at those all the time.
But you may want to look at them once a year or so.
>> I have one last question.
Can you say a little bit more about what
this thing can do and can't do,
what it has the power to do and what
it doesn't have the power to do, its limitations maybe?
>> Absolutely. If you take a look at the top-right corner here,
you have the ability to export all your results to a CSV.
This allows you to do something that I
find supercritical and you
probably do too since you mentioned DevOps,
it actually allows you to take all your recommendations and put
them into Azure DevOps,
for example, or other third-party task tracking tools.
That's one benefit. You can also use that export to surface
your recommendations to other internal stakeholders
and collaborate on how to actually resolve that.
Then we also make it
easy for you to take a look just in the portal
here at which questions you answered,
how you answered them,
and then which options you elected not to choose.
Those are a couple of the features that are available today.
We looked at a bunch of the other ones as we demoed it earlier.
What it can't do as you saw,
it is currently a static assessment
where you walk through a set of questions and answers.
We are looking at expanding that
so it integrates with some of our internal tools
as well and you can say
authenticate to your subscription
and automatically answer questions.
That's pretty high on our backlog,
and we're working through that.
Then another thing that it can't do today
though very soon you will build to have
a milestone type view where you can take the assessment
once and then when you come back in a month or three months,
you can take the same assessment again for
that particular workload without
having to re-answer all the questions again.
It'll just automatically fill in everything
that you previously answered.
>> This is cool, and I think
the other thing that I like about what
this could offer me is it gives me
the chance to go talk to people,
because some of the questions that you asked me,
I was pretty clear I knew and some of them I didn't.
I think just that
experience of going and talking to my colleagues is
going to give me a better understanding of what we're
trying to do and what we're actually doing today.
My last question is,
clearly this is a thing I would do manually,
is there any other Azure related thing that
I could do on a regular basis that's a little more
lightweight that doesn't involve
walking through these questions to get
recommendations for how to
improve things based on the Well-Architected Framework?
>> Absolutely. You can leverage the Azure Advisor,
both the score and the recommendations.
It's a little more lightweight,
it automatically updates the differences,
of course, it only assesses things that you've deployed.
In this case, you could run
the Azure Architecture Review
prior to any deployment happening in your subscription.
But overall, the Advisor is
a great tool to leverage to help you improve your workload.
>> I'm wondering, do you know anybody I
could talk to about Advisor?
>> Yeah. I know a couple of folks that you could talk to.
Socket and Matt are great resources.
>> Cool. If you wouldn't mind introducing me,
I'd love to talk to them, maybe even in the next video.
>> Absolutely. I'll send an e-mail to them.
>> Great, I appreciate that.
With that, I think I'm going to return to host mode.
I'm back to being a host.
With that, I want to thank you for listening to this.
I want to thank David Stanford for his time.
I really hope you'll join us in the next video
of this series in which we go talk to those experts to find
out just how Advisor works and how you can use
it to improve your workloads.
Thank you very much, I look forward to speaking to you soon.
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