>> Welcome to another episode of the Azure Enablement Show.
Today, we are going to talk about
the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework Landing Zone Review.
If you have watched that video,
check out the links and resources below
so you can learn more and try out the assessment yourself.
Then if you have questions or comments,
feel free to comment below and
also make sure you subscribe to the channel.
Do not miss any episodes.
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Welcome back. My name is Thomas Maurer,
and I'm excited to meet Dom and Jeff today to
talk about the Azure Landing Zone Reviews.
Azure landing zones are obviously
a very interesting concept where we have customers go to Azure,
but that can be challenging for customers
who have already started or they're
just thinking about starting because we have different options
depending on where you are and we're
going to make this easier today.
But Dom, before we actually dive into this,
can you explain us what Azure landing zones are?
>> Sure. Let's take a look. An Azure landing zone
is the foundation for a successful Cloud environment.
As part of the Cloud adoption framework journey is
the first technical step and it's a crucial set of
considerations and decisions that help
people build an Azure environment
that will scale with your business.
>> Now, that's fantastic.
But customers are usually often like in different states.
We have customers who are probably just getting
started so they can have really a greenfield approach.
But then we have customers already working with
Azure and they already have resources deployed in Azure.
Can they use that too?
>> We think about it in three core customer types
when we talk about where they are on their journey.
To start with, we have start,
which is that greenfield type
of customer where they're beginning their journey.
They don't have an Azure environment today
and they want to take all of that best practice and
our conceptual architecture as part of
their journey into the Cloud.
The second is a brownfield customer,
where they have some Cloud resources running something in
Azure and they want to align to
our best practices and our conceptual architecture.
We give them guidance on how to take what they've currently
got and align to how we see an Azure landing zone.
The third is where a customer has a well-designed,
well implemented environment, but they
want to add specific elements to it,
for example, security or governance.
We look at those as an enhanced type of
customer and we provide guidance for those as well.
>> Well, that's great. Dom,
wherever customers are in their Cloud journey,
if they just getting started,
if they need to align or if
they need to enhance their landing zone,
we can actually help them.
It's really for everyone.
But Dom, if I now want to implement this,
if I'm thinking about I'm an engineer or a Cloud architect,
how do I think about the Azure landing zone requirements?
What about requirements for that?
>> If we take a look at this, we group the considerations or
the decisions you need to make when you build
your landing zone into what we call our design areas.
We split those into two core groups,
the environment and the compliance.
For the environment decisions,
these are the elements that you
really need to get right first time,
things like your Active Directory tenant,
your identity and access management model,
how are you going to organize your resources and
the network design and connectivity you want?
Alongside those, we have the compliance elements; security,
governance, management, and platform automation and DevOps,
and these are the elements that are likely to
mature and you're going to iterate on over
time as your organization grows
and as the skills inside your organization grow as well.
>> Thank you very much, Dom. This is awesome obviously we
have all these guidance for customers,
but we also want to make it easy for
customers to actually implement that guidance.
That is where I want to talk with Jeff about
the Azure landing zone review assessments.
Jeff, can you tell us a little bit more about that?
>> Yeah, of course, Thomas. The assessments are meant
to help customers understand the investments
that they've made today and where they would want
to further invest in their landing zone design.
Maybe they need more scalability,
maybe they need more modularity and how they're investing in
the resource management groups and the resources or subscriptions.
We really want to provide that guidance for
customers who have already have a landing zone and are
looking for where they need
to invest across the design areas next.
The review assessment helps them
understand where they are in alignment to take
azure landing zone conceptual architecture and
what recommendations we suggest that they
put in place to be in further alignment.
>> Now, this is awesome. This definitely helps customers by
implementing and operationalizing
Azure landing zones in their environment.
Can you show us a little bit how that
works and how we can use that assessment?
>> Sure. First thing I did here is I went to aka.ms/assessments.
This is our assessments site.
Right here I have Azure landing zone review.
I'm just going to go ahead and click on
that Azure landing zone review to start my assessment.
First thing is the name for my assessment.
I'm going to stick with the default name.
You'll also see that you'll get added by default,
the date and the time in there.
As we go through this assessment process,
I want to capture where
our company is currently
making investments across this design area.
I'm just going to select Azure Billing and Active Directory.
I've got some concerns in my organization
today around how we're handling billing
and what recommendations are aligned best to
the guidance that's in the Azure Billing and
Active Directory design area.
Then also governance is a big topic.
I'll take those two and I'll go ahead and click "Start".
From here I'm going to start to
tell the assessment about my organization.
The first question here is,
how do we describe our current Azure environment?
Well, the Azure environment for my organization is that we
have a tenant in place and we have a single subscription,
no management groups in place.
I'll go ahead and select that.
Next, I'll tell the assessment
a little bit about my team, how we organize.
We happen to be a centralized operation
Cloud operating model.
Our Cloud operating model is such that
our core development team works on
the platform as well as the application side.
They have responsibilities for
both the foundational utilities of the landing zone,
the shared services, as well as the workloads themselves.
Once I've done that, I'll go ahead
and click "Next" in my assessment.
Then I've got this question around what are
my capabilities when it comes to infrastructure as code?
Again, informing the assessment about
where our organization lies today.
We've got some strength in GitHub as well as
HashiCorp Terraform and on Azure Bicep.
Once I've got those selected,
I'll go ahead and click "Next".
Now I'm into the Azure Billing and
Active Directory section of the assessment.
We have an enterprise agreement,
so I'll go ahead and select that.
Then the next question here is about my identity infrastructure.
We are trying to understand whether we've made
investments with other Cloud services like Office 365.
My example for my organization,
we do have integration, we have
on-premise Active Directory domain services and we have integrated
that with Azure Active Directory through Azure AD Connect.
I'll go ahead and select that option.
Then the question here is around
what type of features do I require for
my organization when it comes
to operating with infrastructure as code?
I do would like to use
IDE of application and platform management tools,
as well as our Microsoft 365 developer subscription because we do
a lot across the Microsoft platform and Cloud.
My governance design area here,
I'm asked about how we track cost with our resources.
We do that with all of our workloads.
Then I've got a question here around my tagging of my resources.
Currently today, we don't tag
our Azure resources with metadata that helps us identify them,
as well as this next question is about how we optimize
our spending with Azure utilizing Azure Advisor,
and we're just learning how to do that.
Now, once I fill in that last question,
I'll be kicked over to the my guide and to my results.
There's a couple of things I want to call out here with
this guidance and results as we talk
about those best practices, those tips.
The first thing is that all of my results
are put together into a score.
I can see my score here 17 points out of 35,
as well as I can see where I land with
the design areas that I feel that questions for.
I'm doing rather well in Azure Billing and Active Directory.
What about my organization?
Probably need to make some improvements
there as well as on governance.
If I continue to scroll down,
I'll see some actions that are called out here
for going through and preparing the environment,
deploying the Azure Landing Zone accelerator.
Then maybe I need to connect with a partner.
Through that I can continue to scroll down to my results.
This is where I can actually see those recommendations,
Thomas, that we talked about.
This is where it's key to really
understand like for example, with governance,
so I need to put some tagging in place for my resources,
I need to track costs across my business units.
When I click on these recommendations,
I'll be sent to those specific action items
that I can put into my environment.
Now, here's where the tips can click in. I've got the results.
First thing is, I can go up to the top of
the assessment platform and I can export this as a CSV.
You can imagine this is used for probably a number of things.
I would say maybe I'm going to import this into
my Azure DevOps backlog
and we're going to work off of this as a team.
Now, that's a great feature,
great tip customers use.
The other thing is the answer summary.
Sometimes the question doesn't help you
or the answer doesn't help you
understand the question that you were asked.
In the answer summary you can
not only see the question you were asked,
but the answer that you responded to.
This comes to do with tracking as you use the assessment platform.
That's the last tip that I'd like to say,
is that even though you fill out an assessment once,
it doesn't mean that that has to be
your final time filling out this assessment.
I've gone ahead in the background and I filled out
this assessment with every design area.
You can see I've got 111 points out of 243.
You can look at the design areas where I've invested in.
I've got some excellent,
I've got some that are moderate,
some that are critical.
I can see that they're investments that I
need to make across my design areas.
Again, I've got the results down below,
but what I want to point out here is that I can go
through and start a new assessment on the assessment platform.
I'll go through and start my Azure landing zone assessment,
again, just to show you this feature
that I can create a milestone.
In that same assessment where maybe I might
have scored 50 or 60 points,
I can go in and create a milestone,
go through that assessment again,
update my answers because now we put some of
those recommendations in place and
see the improvements that we've made over time.
Those tips and how people are using the assessment,
we've seen a lot of feedback
from our customers and our partners that it helps
solidify their journey in
the next steps that they should take with Azure landing zone.
>> This is fantastic. I'm blown
away because we're taking all the power and
knowledge we have in the Cloud adoption framework
for Azure landing zones.
We are building this assessment tool
to make it super easy for people to
identify gaps on what they need to work
on and see what they can actually do.
I really love it.
If I'm now a customer and I actually want to learn more about
this or maybe also go out and take this assessment, where do I go?
>> Go and check out aka.ms/assessments
and you'll be going through the Azure landing zone review.
>> Thank you very much, Dom.
Thank you very much, Jeff. It was great having you.
Thank you very much everyone watching,
make sure you check out aka.ms/adopt.
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