- Welcome to Azure Essentials.
In the next few minutes I'll walk you
through the ways you can
integrate your on-premises networking, identity,
compute, and data resources with Azure.
I'll also explain how the development tools
and practices that you're currently using
can bridge between Azure and your locally hosted resources.
Opting a cloud integrated or hybrid approach
brings more advantages than if you were
to uniquely host your infrastructure
and services on-premises.
Beyond the pay for what you use economics and elastic scale,
compared to on-premises options,
Azure gives you access to
unparalleled advances in compute,
allowing you take advantage of the latest hardware,
access to the most up-to-date intelligent security
informed by billions of security signals,
and that combined with in-house
and industry expertise and customer controls,
help you to mitigate security threats.
An advanced state of governance
inclusive of our global compliance control framework
can augment your ability to stay compliant
with the latest industry standards and regulations.
The good news is that you can harness these benefits
and more by continuing to leverage
your on-premises investment.
Azure's integration options comprise
a broad range of services, hybrid network connectivity
between your data center and the cloud,
where you can connect your data center via virtual networks
or more directly via Express Route.
Azure provides a common identity model
which gives the users the advantage
of single sign-on experience
across applications and environments
on-premises in Azure and other clouds.
You can integrate your on-premises compute
infrastructure with Azure and determine
which compute resources run in the cloud
versus on-premises and then take advantage
of things like cloud elasticity to scale out,
or cloud-based failover.
A consistent data platform allows you
to keep your data on-premises or in the cloud
to connect with data sources wherever they may reside.
Management and security can be configured to monitor,
manage and secure your hybrid infrastructure
whether it's in your data center, Azure or other clouds
and you can take advantage of a unified development
and DevOps platform for continuous integration
and deployment to any target, either in Azure
or your data center with Azure Stack.
Let's start with networking.
Networking is core to getting
your on-premises solution to talk to Azure.
Azure offers multiple approaches for configuring
secure hybrid networking between your data centers
and resources hosted in Azure.
Azure Virtual Network enables many types
of Azure resources such as Azure Virtual Machines
or VMs, to securely communicate with each other,
the internet and on-premises networks.
You can implement multiple virtual networks
within each Azure subscription and Azure region.
Each virtual network is isolated
from other virtual networks.
And you can also use VPN gateways
to send encrypted traffic between an Azure
virtual network and an on-premises location
over the public internet.
Additionally, Azure Express Route
is a private connection option that lets you
you extend your on-premises networks
into the Microsoft Cloud facilitated
by a connectivity provider.
Express Route connections don't go over the public internet.
This lets Express Route connections offer
more reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies
and higher security than typical
connections over the internet.
Once your network connections are established
between Azure and your data center,
you can move on to identity and access management.
Azure Active Directory allows you to have
common identities between cloud and on-premises.
It's a complete solution for identity and access
management and extends to other Microsoft services,
including Office 365, and to third party services
such as SAP, Salesforce and many many more.
In fact, you'll see the full list at the link shown.
If you have an existing on-premises
active directory solution you can extend it
to Azure AD, using Azure AD Connect,
the recommended tool and approach
for integrating your directory with Azure.
Azure AD Connect allows you to configure
the appropriate authentication method,
including password hash-sync
which securely syncs password hashes
from your directory to Azure.
Pass through authentication which authenticates
in Azure using an agent to connect
with passwords managed on-premises.
Active Directory Federation Services or ADFS which handles
authentication on-premises and may be necessary
for certain configurations or requirements.
These options will ensure that your users
can use the same username and password
to access resources in the cloud.
Azure AD also supports multi-factor authentication
of cross platform APIs including
SAML, WS-Fed, OAuth, and more.
With networks and identities integrated,
you can move on to the compute options for running services
like virtual machines, containers and more.
Azure offers a wide range of virtual machine options
to support your apps and workloads
from low cost VMs to support scale out
our simple dev test scenarios to GPU enabled VMs
for high performance compute, or massive VMs
with up to 12TB of RAM to support workloads
like SAP HANA or big data.
Both Linux and Windows based VMs are available
in the Azure Marketplace and
you can upload your own custom images.
Virtual Machines can be connected
to your on-premises compute and common hybrid options
include dev test scenarios using VMs in the cloud.
Business continuity and fail over
in case of local service outages.
Where the cloud really shines is with scaling out
compute resources to meet elastic demand
of specific apps and workloads.
You can also use Azure's virtual machine scale sets
to create and manage a group of identical low balance VMs.
The number of VM instances can automatically increase
or decrease in response to demand or a defined schedule.
Scale sets provide high availability to your applications
and allow you to centrally manage, configure
and update a large number of VMs.
To learn more about your compute options,
check out recent Azure Essential episodes on the topic.
Now beyond unifying network, identity and compute,
a consistent data platform can bridge your data
to securely integrate with Azure.
You can configure your on premises databases
to connect securely to read, write or transfer data
between your data center and Azure
using VPN, Express Route or internet-based connectivity.
In a hybrid configuration, you've got full control
over where your data resides.
You can keep it on premises, in Azure or both.
Hybrid connectivity to Azure gives you a number of benefits
such as fast deployment and elastic scale.
You can quickly set up and manage
your SQL server deployments and then scale up or down.
We support both Windows Server and Linux platforms
including RedHat, SUSE and Ubuntu.
And we give you the ability to lift and shift
your databases with solutions like
the new Azure Database Migrations Service
so that you can move data with zero code changes
to the cloud while maintaining full management control.
You can also take advantage of high availability
and disaster recovery for your backups
through Azure geo replication across multiple data centers
and also restore your backups to Azure VMs
in the case of an on-premises failure.
With Azure you can also choose the Azure data centers
to host your data to meet data sovereignty requirements.
Azure analytic services help grow your current data
estate with solutions like Azure Datalake,
Azure Data Bricks and Power BI.
Whether that data resides on-premises or in the cloud,
it allows you to manage, process, and transform
any type of data into valuable insights
and use AI to reason that data.
You can check out our Azure Essentials
on data visualization and data analytics
for overviews on your options.
Another core piece to integrating the service
and services you host with those running in Azure
is getting to a unified management experience
for operations and security.
For management, you can integrate
services in both directions to achieve a common dashboard
of control plane regardless of where resources are hosted.
Via Azure you can use Azure insights and analytics
to collect and analyze information end to end
for Windows and Linux systems running on-premises
or even other cloud platforms.
Log analytics is another Azure-based service
that enables proactive insights and troubleshooting.
Logs can be fed into the service
from Azure on-premises or across clouds.
These options use the Microsoft monitoring agent
and work spaces to collect information
from managed resources.
If you're already using Systems Center Operations Manager,
you can integrate alerts from operations manager
into Azure services.
You can then use the system center management pack
for Microsoft Azure to let you monitor
the availability and performance of Azure resources.
The management pack runs on a specified server pool
and uses rest APIs to remotely discover and collect
performance information about the specified Azure resources.
Beyond monitoring and troubleshooting,
you can use common policy management
and automation services with both
environments connected from PowerShell,
Bash and DSC to Azure Desired State Management and Runbooks.
The new Windows admin center provides a unified view
and management console for Windows Servers
whether they're hosting your data center,
Azure or other clouds.
It also performs native backup between
your server infrastructure and Azure.
In terms of security, common controls can be leveraged
by the Azure security center which can be configured
to give you a unified view of your Azure
and on-premises hosted compute resources.
With Azure Security Center, you can
apply security policies across
your hybrid cloud workloads,
reduce your exposure to threats,
and detect and respond to attacks.
Azure Security Center provides centralized
policy management for security policies,
continuous security assessment
to monitor the security of virtual machines,
networks, storage, data services and applications
to discover potential security issues,
actionable recommendations to remediate
security vulnerabilities before they can be
exploited by attackers with prioritized
and actionable security recommendations
as well as advanced cloud defenses with
just in time access to management ports
and white listing to control applications
running on your VM's hosted in Azure
and you can configure your resources
wherever they reside for log collection,
search, and security analysis
including connected partner solutions.
As you develop your apps and services,
it's important that code and resources
are portable enough to be hosted
in your data center or in the cloud,
helping to enable hybrid configurations
or dynamically extend resources
to run your workloads via the cloud.
Development tools like Visual Studio
and Visual Studio Code and scripting tools
like PowerShell or Bash can seamlessly
move between on-premises and Azure hosted services.
Visual Studio team services provides
a full CI/CD pipeline for your applications
no matter which language you're using
and it can deploy to several targets
on-premises or in Azure, including
virtual machines, Azure Service Fabric,
and container orchestrators like Kubernetes.
With Azure you can take this a step further
compared to other clouds using Azure Stack,
which allows you to host a subset of
the cloud services offered by Azure in your own data center.
Azure Stack lets your developers
build and deploy software in the same way
whether it runs on-premises or in the cloud
and this extends to both infrastructure
Azure service components like VMs and networking
along with platform Azure service options
like Blob storage, containers,
Kubernetes orchestration, Service Fabric,
and App Service to create apps and microservices.
Because Azure and Azure Stack offer
the same services and the same interfaces,
moving applications between the two is straightforward.
If you've adopted DevOps practices,
this now works identically for Azure
in the public cloud and Azure Stack
in your local data center.
You can then use your tools to create
deployment pipelines for new apps and services.
With simple changing the targeted pipeline URLs,
you can use the same DevOps pipelines
between cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments.
So that was an overview of
the primary integration options to connect
your resources in your data center to Azure.
For even more information on your hybrid options,
check out the link shown.
You can learn all about your options
for identity management, compute,
data and DevOps and more by following
the related topics on Azure Essentials.
Thanks for watching!