>> Good news. We have a new video in
the Well-Architected series of part
of the Azure Enablement show in which we're going to be
talking to Saket Gupta about a tool that will give us
the advice we need right at
our fingertips to improve our Azure workloads.
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'll be exploring a tool that provides essential advice
at your fingertips basically for improving Azure workloads.
In order to explore this tool and to talk about this,
I think it's probably better to see what it's like
if you're the customer using this tool.
Let me switch to customer mode.
Hey, Saket, thank you for being here today.
I was told that you could help
me out with this question that I have.
Just to introduce myself,
I'm an Engineering Director here at Contoso Hotels.
We've been doing this migration to Azure,
it's been going really well.
But we're having this thing going on where there's
this responsibility shifting from being
one big central operations team to individual workload teams.
Now, every application owner is
responsible for their performance and their reliability,
and cost, and security.
I would just like to know, have we customers have anything,
any tools that Microsoft gives us to be able to handle that?
>> Hey, David, it's great to be working with you on this one.
Thanks for briefing the scenario.
Azure has built Azure Advisor,
which is the exact tool you are looking for.
Once you migrate to Azure Infrastructure,
Azure will completely take care of
your physical hardware and virtualization.
But rest of the things as a customer you have to take care of.
But Azure has built so many tools to help you with that,
like Azure Cost Management,
Azure Security Center, Azure Policy,
and of course, Azure Advisor.
Azure Advisor helps you in improving
the optimization posture for your workloads and
applications. It's free of cost.
Once you are part of Azure family,
you get all these offerings as free.
Let's go deep in Azure Advisor and let me walk
you through how Azure Advisor
can help you with your business scenarios.
>> I would really appreciate it.
>> Here you can see Azure Advisor
is your personalized Cloud consultant.
It provides you best practice recommendations,
which are tailor-made for your applications.
These recommendations are super actionable.
It's low cost, low investment.
The biggest thing here is like
Advisor aligns really well with well-architected framework.
All the categories you see in
Advisor are the same categories which
your distributed responsibility challenge will cater to.
For example, like cost is one category,
the other categories are performance,
reliability, security, and operational excellence.
Your different teams in your organization focusing on one category
in Advisor are taking care
of different pillars of an Well-Architected framework.
Let's now talk about how does Advisor generate the recommendation?
Let's understand how it
can be very impactful in your business scenario.
>> Cool. You want to show me how it works. Excellent.
>> Correct. In my screen,
if you see the left side,
imagine like this was your application and your workload.
All your resources are sitting on the left side,
and this is your Azure infrastructure.
Azure captures all the telemetry
for your resources usage and configuration.
On the right side, you will see Azure services.
Imagine like these services are capturing all your telemetry.
Now, what Advisor does is Advisor builds
a smart intelligence over this telemetry. Let's take an example.
If you are using virtual machines for your application,
then Azure services are capturing your CPU,
memory, and network utilization.
Advisor has built models which use these three attributes
and come back and recommend you
to resize or shutdown underutilized VMs,
which will save you a lot of cost.
That's one recommendation I talked about.
Similarly, Azure Advisor does
this for different services and resource types,
and generate the whole breadth
of recommendations for your application.
>> Cool, I would really love it if you could just take
a moment to look at one of our workloads,
the architecture diagram for it just so I can
understand how I'm going to apply
this to what I'm actually running right now.
>> Totally. Let's talk about it.
>> Cool. This is the architecture
for the main app that we're
having that handles things like the bookings for hotels.
It has a mobile component to it.
There's lots of moving pieces here.
That's where I get a little lost and how I can apply
this tool given all the things that it could look at.
Can you help me understand where it's going to pull information,
and what useful stuff I can get from it for my case?
>> Sure thing. David, can you speak about which is
your most business critical application in your architecture?
This architecture looks very nice.
>> I think that's probably the most.
There's three things going on here.
On the left, you can see that there's
this public website which is
important because that's how people interact with it.
There are APIs that this talks to
in the back end that is running in Azure Kubernetes Service.
It's really crucial as part of this
that they are able to connect to that.
Down at the bottom,
there is a database and that database [inaudible].
This is all providing
the front end and then a booking API so people can book hotels.
>> Perfect, and booking API and booking
application should be like
a business critical application for you.
Booking doesn't work. Let's focus on these two.
Azure Kubernetes Service is already onboarded to Advisor,
so as the data stores like Cosmos DB and SQL DB.
Let's go into the Azure portal and try
some recommendations and the experiences to help you
understand how you can leverage advisor to stay optimized
and maintain your business continuity for your all applications.
This is Azure portal and this is the Azure Advisor landing page.
You can get to this page by typing Advisor here,
or you can get to this page from [inaudible] no.
If you click here, you will see Advisor here.
This is the landing page.
What you are seeing here is the recommendation for
all your subscriptions under
which the applications you wrote for your infrastructure,
all the resources exist in these subscriptions.
Basically, what you are doing here is you are defining
the scope on which you want the advisor recommendations for.
It's also very critical here,
you maintain the hygiene for
your subscription distribution so that you
can leverage the tool in the best possible fashion.
Coming to the homepage,
you will see different categories in Advisor.
These again map to Well-Architected pillars;
so Cost, Security, Reliability,
Performance, and Operational Excellence.
What you are seeing is the number of
recommendations under each of the pillar here.
For example, under cost,
you have two recommendations.
These recommendations are for four resources.
These can be for different resource types like
virtual machines or IP containers,
whatever we have recommendations for.
By taking action on these two recommendation,
you can save around $2,000 in annualized savings.
So this is how you read this page overall.
Let's go forward and engage with one of the recommendations here.
I'm going to choose performance
because performance and reliability is the most
important for you and for the booking application overall.
So I clicked on it and I will get to the Performance page.
Here you will see the list of all the performance recommendations.
Right now you have one.
This is for your Kubernetes service.
So Advisor has identified that seven of
your Kubernetes clusters are
working on an unsupported good Kubernetes version.
This is a very high risk for all your performances
because an unsupported version
can get you into trouble situations.
Other things that you can see is
the filters for subscription and grouping.
So if you have multiple recommendation here,
you can group them by subscriptions.
Coming to the Kubernetes or recommendation here,
let's go forward and start taking action on this recommendation.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this Recommendation.
By clicking, you will get to the Recommendation Details page.
Here, you will have
some more information about the recommendation.
There is a Learn More link which will take you to
the detailed recommendation description,
how it was generated,
and what it talks about,
so if you want to read and learn more about this recommendation.
Down below, it will list down
all the clusters for which this recommendation is applicable to.
So it will give you exact details for all the clusters.
You can do a Group by subscription here to
see what all subscriptions are impacted.
You can also do Group by resource group
if that's the grain that you work on.
That's the beauty of Advisor.
It goes to all the grains which you
as an Azure consumer operates on.
You are now well aware of what all clusters
are working on unsupported Kubernetes version
and you are ready to take action.
So to take action for this specific recommendation,
we have this link which talks about the steps you have to
take to update the version of your Kubernetes.
There are certain recommendations also
where you can take instant action.
I'm going to show you another recommendation
where you can take the action right here only.
>> Okay.
>> So that completes the whole recommendation flow
where you get to the recommendation category,
you find the right recommendation, and you take action.
>> So I'll be interested in the thing,
the one that's in instant action.
Then I have a really quick
follow-up question about this because now I'm
getting a little nervous
about something and I'll tell you about it in a second.
>> Sure thing. Okay. Cool. Let's go
to the homepage back and go to Advisor again.
I'm going to tell you a very instant action
one is the cost recommendation.
So let's engage with that one.
I already talked about the right size shut down VM recommendation.
This gives you cost savings. Let's engage with that.
You also see a tag here called Quick fix.
We have introduced this functionality to
reduce the cost of taking action.
I'm going to show you how it reduces the effort
and cost of taking action on this recommendation.
What this recommendation is about is like
your virtual machines are underutilized.
This is based on our analysis and
our smart intelligence we have buried on this Office Telemetry.
What we are recommending here is
either resizing your virtual machines to SKU,
which is cheaper, or shut down.
You don't have the shutdown recommendation here,
but you have two virtual machines which could be
resized to a lower size SKU.
So from DS2 to B2.
You will save a lot of money if you do that.
An instant action here could be you just
select these two recommendations.
If you have more, you can multi-select.
With a single click,
you can remediate this recommendation.
So if I do that and I click "OK",
it will just go ahead and remediate these recommendations.
I intentionally had one which showed error.
You can also get the definition of the error, what happened,
why these are not being recommended,
and you can further take action to remediate this recommendation.
>> I know you don't have a lot of time today,
so let me see if I can ask
my two questions that got me a little nervous.
The first one is, I appreciate that there's
all these things and I appreciated that
Advisor is going to tell me what I need to do,
but I'm fuzzy on how I'm going to stay on
top of all of this because it looks like I could
be getting recommendations all the time.
Does that mean that I should just be in the portal all day long?
What do I do to make sure that I'm not missing things?
>> That's the super foundational caution, David.
We get it from all our bigger customer.
As you grow your Azure footprint,
you have bigger subscriptions and bigger applications.
The number of recommendation also gets bigger in the countdown.
It's very difficult to keep top on or stay on top of
those recommendation and achieve continued optimization.
So to achieve that,
we have introduced two capabilities in Advisor. These are here.
The first one is Alerts
and the second one is Recommendation digest.
Let's talk about alerts first.
These are standard Azure Monitor alerts,
which you can build on your subscriptions for recommendations.
You talked about the distributed ownership
or responsibility for optimization.
This fits really well in there.
So what you could do is or the
teams who are taking care of the distributed ownership,
like a performance optimization team,
what they can do is they can create
an alert for a subscription for their area.
For example here, you selected
a subscription and you can select a category here.
So same performance.
What it will do is whenever there is
a new recommendation generated under Performance category,
it will give you an Azure Monitor alert.
You can also make it at a recommendation level.
If you just care about your Kubernetes service,
then you just type Kubernetes and you can select
a recommendation which I just showed you before.
Whenever there is a new cluster which
has an unsupported Kubernetes version,
this will generate an alert for you.
These alerts can be configured for an action group.
The beauty of action group is that these are
Azure resources which support different channel types.
So you can get this alert over an e-mail,
over a text, or a call,
or you can have a webhook endpoint,
over which you can build connectors which creates tickets in
your organization which can be acted upon by different people.
So it's like a workflow management.
Finally, you can also build automation over these alerts.
So you can write a function app or a logic app.
What it will do is whenever
this alert or [inaudible] recommendation generated,
that app is triggered and it automatically takes
care of the remediation of this recommendation.
>> Okay. What was the digest thing that you mentioned?
Then I'll ask you my final question.
>> Sure thing. The second one is recommendation digest.
This is perfectly suited for you, David,
because you are the Engineering Director and you don't want
the granular details of what
that recommendation is about and
how to remediate this recommendation.
You just want the summary of
all your recommendation or
different pillars so that you can understand
and plan forward on how to
maintain the optimization posture for your Azure ecosystem.
So what this one does is that if you create a digest on
a subscription and select a category here, you can multi-select.
Here, imagine that you have selected all the categories.
If you select a frequency,
say by weekly, then what it will do is every two weeks,
it will send you a summary of your recommendation;
how many performance, how many
[inaudible] recommendations you have.
This will help you really well in planning
and getting a sense of how much investment we have done,
how are different teams and departments are
progressing in their optimization journey.
This again supports action group.
So you can get it based on what channel type is suitable for you.
>> Cool. Here is my final question.
You've been super generous with your time.
The only concern I have left after all this is
that when I go to a Advisor now,
I see I have a ton of
recommendations and some number of impacted resources,
I see some potential savings,
but I can't tell whether I'm
doing well for what I want to be doing.
I can't tell if this is good or bad.
How do I know if I have an acceptable number?
You said they grow over time and if I should be concerned.
>> You know what, David, we have just the right feature for you.
It's Advisor Score in the experience.
This is the industry standard score we have introduced.
Let's talk more about it in our next session because this is
complex enough that it has
great value overall in what you talked about.
>> Cool. I love that. If you happen to know anybody
who's an expert in Advisor Score,
I hope you'll bring that person along.
>> Yeah, for sure. I have
just the right person also to talk about Advisor Score.
>> Excellent. With that,
I think I probably should switch back to Host Mode.
It was really great to talk to
Saket and hear what he would say to a customer.
I really appreciate you listening and I hope you
get some really useful information on this.
Please join us next time when we pick
up on that really cool feature that
I just heard about called Advisor Score. See you then.
[MUSIC]