>> My name is Alfred Sin,
I'm a Program Manager at Microsoft,
and I'll be talking to you today about running
your Red Hat and SUSE workloads
more effectively with the Azure Hybrid Benefit.
Today I'll go over some of the capabilities
that we have for Linux and open source on Azure.
We'll talk about the payment options that
you have on Azure when you're running Linux workloads,
so this include pay-as-you-go,
I'll go into a little bit about the software pre-paid program,
and we'll talk about bring-your-own-subscription.
Then I'll talk about the Azure Hybrid Benefit,
and how it works for Linux because that's
a brand new functionality that's just coming out.
I'll give you a demo of how
the Azure Hybrid Benefit works with Linux,
and then we'll wrap things up.
First of all let's talk a little bit about
Linux and open source on Azure and some of
the capabilities that we have as
a platform to help make your lives easier.
The first one you might have heard of
before is our integrated support,
and the reason why we keep bringing
this up is because it's so great.
We have dedicated support engineers from Red Hat,
from Microsoft, and from SUSE
who work together to resolve your support cases.
If you're dealing with, for example, a real
issue, the Red Hat and Microsoft support
engineers can collaborate on
the same case sharing the same contexts between companies to
identify where the issue lies and
help you resolve it in the fastest manner possible,
and it's the same for SUSE and Microsoft.
There are dedicated SUSE support engineers
and dedicated Microsoft support engineers,
and they can collaborate on the support cases as well.
That just benefits you because
it helps you resolve your issues faster.
In terms of Linux native tool and we have a few things.
One that comes to mind is the Azure Tuned Kernel this is
where we work with various Linux distro-vendors to tune
their Kernels that they shipped on their Linux images in the
Azure marketplace so that the Kernels are all optimized for Azure,
and this includes things like accelerated networking and whatnot.
Another capability that comes to mind, that's not mentioned in
this slide, is the Azure Serial Console.
The way the Serial Console works and the way it's useful
is in those can't connect scenarios.
For example if your VM cannot boot,
if your file system is messed up,
if the networking is down, or
if you otherwise can't SSH into
the VM you have the Serial Console because
the Serial Console basically takes the serial port of
the VM and brings that up to you in the portal.
If your left stuck in a can't connect
scenario odds are you'll be able
to use the Serial Console to fix your way out of it.
We also have a tool called the Azure Cloud Shell.
This is available both in
the Azure Portal as well as at shell.azure.com.
The Azure Cloud Shell is a really great convenient way to get
started as a developer on Azure
it comes pre-loaded with the Azure CLI,
it comes with Python, Ansible,
Terraform so you can use the standard developer tools right in
your Azure environment to get
you started with your Azure environment quickly and easily.
We've had a lot of cost-effective options
for you as well, that'll be the focus of the rest
of this presentation you're about to hear.
We've got all kinds of applications slash
platform level functionality for security,
update management, governance, and general management of your VM.
Obviously we've got things like
automatic patching and updates with Update Management,
we've got policy configuration with Azure Policy,
we have Azure Monitor,
and a whole slew of other things including of
course fundamentals like high availability,
like Azure has several different levels of high availability.
We could spend a whole talk on that,
but I'm not going to.
Instead let's talk about payment options.
Linux on Azure payment option, what does that even mean?
There's three general payment options for Linux on Azure
and this applies to both Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL,
and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SLES.
The most common one that you've probably
heard of is pay-as-you-go,
we've also got prepaid software plans,
and we've also got a bring-your-own-subscription option.
Pay-as-you-go is pretty much exactly as
it sounds like you pay for what you use.
You can start your VMs,
and you can stop them anytime,
and you're only billed for the amount
of time that the VM was running.
This allows you to do
scenarios like trying things out before you buy them.
You can deploy for example a proof of concept.
You can try it out and then you can stop
your VM whenever and you only get billed for that.
You're not required to have any sort of
pre-existing reservations for usage or anything.
However if you've decided that you do want to spend
more resources on Azure
and you're looking for ways to optimize your costs,
prepaid software plans are a good idea.
They come with a great pricing discount,
but the downside of that is that you have
to commit to a certain amount of time.
You need to commit to either a one year or a three year length of
usage to realize that full software discount.
Another option to save costs is bring-your-own-subscription.
The bring-your-own-subscription images that we have
available for both RHEL and SLES, they allow you to
use your existing software subscriptions
which you've either purchased it at Red Hat Cloud Access program,
or the SUSE Public Cloud program,
and use those with the BYOS images in Azure.
Effectively these BYOS images don't bill for any of
the software fees that are
associated with the pay-as-you-go images,
and you're expected to bring your own source of
updates through your own separate software subscription.
Now all of these options are available through what
we call Images in the Azure marketplace,
and these images come in a few different flavors.
For pay-as-you-go, we've got
your standard RHEL and SLES pay-as-you-go images.
So these come entitled to access
your standard-based software repositories,
you can spin up a VM with them and you're good to go,
but for more special use cases we also
have a few different varieties.
For example, if you're looking into doing
some high performance computing specific workloads we have
the SLES for HPC pay-as-you-go images
which include access to the special HPC packages.
We also have RHEL and SLES for SAP images,
and those include access to
the specific SAP software packages
that'll allow you to run your SAP workloads on Azure.
Then of course we have RHEL with the High Availability Add-on
in case you're looking to run highly available workloads,
but not necessarily a full-on SAP workload.
These pay-as-you-go images, they charge two separate things.
They charge for the base compute fee,
and then they charge for a software fee on top.
That's good to know, and that's good to keep in
mind as you compare and contrast them with the BYOS images.
Before we move on to the BYOS images I'll just quickly say that
the prepaid software plans work with the pay-as-you-go images.
So you can apply the software discount
onto the pay-as-you-go images which helps reduce your cost.
Now if you want to zero out that software costs on top entirely
because you have your own subscriptions elsewhere,
and that's where the BYOS images come in handy.
When you're using the BYOS images, all you're paying for
is the base compute fee so you're only paying for the hardware,
and you're not paying any extra for the software on top.
You don't get any packages with them.
You don't get access to the SAP packages.
You don't get access to the base SLES or RHEL packages,
but instead you're expected to connect those VMs deployed off
of the BYOS images to your own source of updates,
and that's where your previously
owned subscriptions come in handy.
The catch with these pay-as-you-go and
BYOS subscriptions is once you deploy a pay-as-you-go image,
and once you deploy a BYOS image,
you couldn't really switch back and forth.
If you've deployed a bunch of pay-as-you-go images,
there will be left billing for
both the hardware and the software fee,
even if you find yourself
with a RHEL or SLES subscription in hand.
However, that is changing.
That takes us to our next topic,
which is the Azure Hybrid Benefit and how we're making
Linux subscriptions and managing Linux subscriptions
easier for you with this Azure Hybrid Benefit.
We're announcing a new update to the Benefit,
which will allow you to use it with Linux, with RHEL and SLES.
How does this work and what is this?
Well, if you are a RHEL or SLES customer on Azure
running some RHEL or SLES VMs,
and you have RHEL or SLES subscription separately,
you might be interested in this.
This allows you to convert your running pay-as-you-go VM.
If you remember back a couple slides,
there's a whole set of pay-as-you-go images.
If you have VMs running off of those images,
those VMs can be converted to charge only the BYOS fee,
so only the hardware fee.
This is available in the portal,
it's available in the CLI.
It's super easily accessible.
The key thing here is that you can do this
without rebooting or redeploying your VM,
so you won't experience any downtime at all.
That means that you're running workloads that you have already.
They will not be impacted when you
do this conversion and you use this Benefit on your VMs.
Obviously you'll save software costs because you'll be using
your own subscriptions and the cost of the VMs will
lower and it's very useful.
Here's a couple of use cases for you in case you're
wondering how you might want to use this.
The first use case is,
let's say that you have an existing workload running on Azure.
Maybe it was in a PoC state,
maybe it was in a DevTest environment or something,
and you're looking to move it to production.
You already have existing RHEL and SLES subscriptions
that you didn't want to use yet
when you deployed it on Azure because you were
just running a PoC or you were just running a test workload.
In this case, when you want to move to production,
you probably want to keep those VMs if they're working for you.
There's no sense redeploying a brand new environment
and having to tweak it and set it all up again.
But at the same time, you probably want to optimize your costs.
If you have a RHEL and SLES software subscription handy,
you probably want to use them with those pay-as-you-go VMs to
reduce the overall cost that you incur
because you've already purchased those subscriptions.
With the Azure Hybrid Benefit,
when you move your workloads to
production or when you're moving them around,
you can apply the Benefit to your existing pay-as-you-go VMs and
lower the cost by removing
the software fee and only charging for that base hardware fee.
You can do that without any interruption,
any downtime to your PoC or
your DevTest workload or anything. That's one use case.
Another use case is,
and I've seen some customers ask me about this,
is where you want to migrate to Azure as soon as possible.
Maybe the people around you are saying,
"Hey, you should get onto Azure."
Maybe you have someone above you telling you
to move onto Azure as soon as possible,
regardless, you want to
move to the Cloud and Azure is your chosen Cloud.
However, you might also be having conversations in
parallel with Red Hat or SUSE about
preferential volume pricing for
software subscriptions and you don't necessarily want
to block on those conversations
to migrate to the Cloud but at the same time,
you're worried about being locked into a specific payment model.
With this Hybrid Benefit,
what you can do is you can start
your deployment on the pay-as-you-go images,
continue your conversations in
parallel and then once you've secured
that preferential volume pricing with either Red Hat or SUSE,
then you can apply that
retroactively to your VMs that you have already deployed.
Those VMs will not get rebooted, there's no downtime,
and they'll start charging less because
you have bought separate subscriptions.
This allows you to worry about
one fewer thing when you're considering an Azure migration,
and the worry that you might previously have on
your mind is being locked into a specific payment model,
that's no longer a concern.
You're probably wondering how
the Azure Hybrid Benefit works fullness exactly.
This is such a new functionality that I get to be
the pleasure to probably be the first person to demo this to you.
First I'll tell you how it works
and just a high-level overview of the steps to get it
working for you and then I'll show you
exactly how it works in both the portal and the CLI.
Here's how you get started with it.
We're launching this initially as a preview phase
so this will be accessible after you fill out the form.
The link to the form is located here.
You can find it at aka.ms/ahb-linux-form.
Once you're done there,
you'll get a confirmation from Microsoft saying,
"Hey, you're now enrolled in the Azure Hybrid Benefit."
Now, if you're a Red Hat customer,
you will also want to sign up for Red Hat Cloud Access.
What that will do is it'll give you a chance
to enable your Azure subscriptions for Cloud access
and those are the Azure subscriptions which
contain the VMs you want to use the Benefit on.
After that, you're done. You're able to use the Benefit.
The Benefit, like I said,
it's available in both the Azure Portal and in the Azure CLI,
and within both the portal and CLI,
it's available during the VM create
experience or the VM update experience.
In the portal, you can find it in the VM Configuration Blade.
In the Azure CLI, you can use either "az vm update",
as you can see in the slide
or if you want to do it at create time,
you can use az vm create.
There's a license-type parameter and there's a couple of
special values in there, SLES BYOS or RHEL BYOS.
That's enough talking. Let's show you how it actually works.
I'm in the CLI. I'm just going to run this command here.
What I'm going to do here is I have an existing VM,
it's named RHEL 78 Latest so it's running RHEL.
It was created off of a RHEL 7.8 pay-as-you-go image.
It's in a resource group named Delete Me,
so I remember to delete it later.
I'm going to give it a license-type of
RHEL _ BYOS. What does this do?
This will specifically enable the Benefit on
the VM but it'll tell the platform to say, "Hey,
on this VM, it has a license-type now of RHEL _
BYOS so only bill at the RHEL _ BYOS level."
Let's go ahead and run this.
It'll take a couple seconds but as I mentioned,
what's happening right now is the platform
is doing its thing and saying,
"Hey, look, I've got a RHEL BYOS license-type."
I'm going to apply it to this VM,
and then if it's successful,
I should see a big blob of JSON coming out,
which will contain basically all the details that are on my VM.
You notice I specifically requested
a JSON output as my final argument.
You can do this in the Azure CLI.
You can do a table output.
I find the JSON output in this case
to be a lot more useful because it will
contain every single detail about this VM called RHEL 78 Latest.
You can see a bunch of cool things here.
We can spend all day talking about this.
But I'm going to highlight
one specific field and that is the license-types.
The license-type value on this VM is now RHEL _ BYOS,
and that's the special Hybrid Benefit license-type value.
That will tell the platform to bill at a RHEL BYOS billing rate.
What else is available? As you can imagine,
SLES is also available.
Let's go look at the help text for
az vm update because that will give us
some more details and is identical for az vm create.
Up here you can see there's a license-type and you can specify
the license-type value and in
the allowed values you've got RHEL BYOS,
SLES BYOS as two of the allowed values.
You can use those values to specify that
the VM should be a Hybrid Benefit VM.
It should bill at the BYOS rate.
That's the CLI.
You're probably wondering how it looks in the portal
and I've got a portal loaded up and ready to go for you here.
This is a RHEL VM.
I created this VM actually quite recently
off of a RHEL pay-as-you-go image from the marketplace.
This is actually RHEL 8.2, but that
doesn't really matter for the purpose of this demo.
There's a licensing section inside
the configuration section in the VM page and under Licensing,
I have my subscription enabled for Red Hat Cloud Access so
that allows me to see this radio button and I can go, "Yes",
I will confirm that I have enabled, that I have
eligible Red Hat Cloud Access subscription to attach to this VM,
and I save it, and that's done.
This VM has now been updated to RHEL BYOS.
The experience is similar for SLES.
This is a SLES 15 VM.
I just switched tabs for those of you that might be confused.
It is running in a subscription
and under the Configuration page, just like for RHEL,
you can click "Yes",
I would like to use an existing SUSE subscription,
confirm it and save it,
and that's all takes and then we're done.
This is the VM update experience.
It's very similar in the VM create experience.
This is the VM Create page.
What I'm doing here is let's try a RHEL 8.2 VM on a subscription.
This Alfred's Demo Apparatus subscription,
I have deliberately not enabled RHEL Red Hat Cloud Access on
this so this will prevent me from
creating a VM and using the Hybrid Benefit.
You notice over here on my RHEL VM,
I have my radio boxes that I could click "Yes".
This doesn't exist if your subscription
is not part of the Red Hat Cloud Access program.
If you're using this for Red Hat VMs,
make sure that your subscription is
a part of the Red Hat Cloud Access program.
It's a prerequisite here.
Now, the SLES experience
is basically identical to the update experience.
For SLES, I can just click "Yes",
I confirm I have a SUSE subscription.
Let's see, I think I have the other fields correct,
so I can go ahead and review and create.
Things are good. Then I can go ahead and
create my VM. I'll create it.
We don't really need to see it finish.
Here's a message. This is a cool feature actually.
You should probably check this out separately but that wraps
up the end of my Hybrid Benefit demo.
Let's flip back to the slides.
Coming back to the summary here,
you can get started with
the Azure Hybrid Benefit Linux preview at this form.
It's available at aka.ms/ahb-linux-form.
There's also a couple more links here to
learn more about the Hybrid Benefit.
There's one that goes to azure.Microsoft.com and you can also
learn more about Linux on Azure at azure.com/linux.
We've also included a couple links at the bottom to tell you
a little bit more about pay-as-you-go
pricing and software prepaid plans
that I mentioned earlier in this presentation.
[MUSIC]
With that, I'll thank you for your time
and hope you have a great rest of
the day wherever you are watching this.