DAVID WHITE: Hi, welcome to Google.
My name is David White.
I'm going to talk to you today about running your Windows
workloads on Google Cloud.
I'm a Solution Manager here at Google in the infrastructure
modernization group and before joining
Google I've spent most of my career as a COO, CIO, VP of IT.
Essentially I've spent more of my time as the customer
than on this side of the table.
So I want to talk to you a little bit today about why
customers are running their Microsoft workloads on GCP,
talk a little bit about Microsoft licensing options
in GCP, and then we'll talk about phase transformation
of your Microsoft workloads in your Microsoft applications.
So the first question that we often hear is, why on earth
would anybody bring Microsoft workloads to Google Cloud?
And I think this more than anything else answers it best.
Urs Holzle, our senior vice president
of engineering and technical infrastructure,
"We're committed to making GCP a first class
platform for running Microsoft workloads."
And if you look back over the last five years
since he made that statement, Google
has continued to invest in optimizing and modernizing
and bringing in the technologies and tools that
allow you to bring your enterprise Microsoft
workloads into Google Cloud.
Today, thousands of our customers
are running Windows workloads in Google Cloud,
amounting to billions of core hours every year of Windows
workloads.
Some of our recent customers, including Travix and Volusion
and, most recently, TELUS International,
talk about how they have brought their Windows
workloads into Google and what a great decision it's been.
So why do people want to bring Microsoft workloads
into Google?
First and foremost, Google has phenomenal infrastructure.
Between our underlying compute capabilities,
the speed of our storage, the robustness of our network,
and the security that we bake into everything,
Google always wants to make sure that we provide the best
for our customers that we can.
Google also preferences giving customers choice.
We want to be able to provide an array of offerings
so that customers can choose which
different pieces are going to fit their solutions best.
And Google, first and foremost, is committed to modernization
and to an open platform.
We are devoted to the open source community,
and we are the innovators behind things like Kubernetes,
TensorFlow, GKE, and other tools that are commonly used today
throughout a variety of clouds.
So let's talk a little bit about our three staged approach.
First, is to migrate.
So we help you with a lift and shift,
moving from your on-premises data center
into Google Cloud, migrating your VMs into our Google
Compute Engine, and potentially even
upgrading those versions of the operating system
where possible.
I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment.
This is using our Migrate for Compute Engine tool.
By doing this, we work with you to get the right balance
of your bring your own licensing capabilities versus
a pay-as-you-go licensing.
We help you take advantage of Google technology,
such as CPU overcommit and custom VM shapes,
and we allow you to leverage suspending and resuming
your VMs, so that you can save on costs when
things aren't actually needed.
Next, we'll talk a little bit about our modernization
opportunities.
These are the ways in which we can
help you bring your Windows applications into containers
and still be in Windows.
Or taking advantage of our fully managed service offerings,
like Cloud SQL or Managed Active Directory.
And all of this results in a greater efficiency, tighter bin
packing, and better cost optimization.
Lastly, we can talk about how we can help you
transform your applications.
Moving to more open standards, like Postgres or MySQL,
or moving your .NET on Windows into .NET core.
Or lastly taking your .NET applications and containerizing
them for ease of management and ease of scale.
Where do I go?
As I said, Google wants to provide you
a variety of choices so that you can choose
per workload what the best destination is for your Windows
applications.
First choice is the Google Compute Engine.
This is our standard Google VM environment
where we can help you bring your on-prem VMs using
our Migrate for Compute Engine.
If there are applications that it makes more sense
to stay in VMware, we can help you
stay in VMware with our VMware as a service offering.
It allows you to leverage native VMware tools like HCX
to do your migrations and helps you
move those workloads from VMware on premises
into VMware and Google Cloud, where you can still
take advantage of all of the Google Cloud features
and services.
Lastly, for those items that are appropriate to containerize,
we can help you with our Migrate for Anthos tool to take
your .NET applications that are running in VMs today
and actually put them into Windows containers running
in Kubernetes.
Similarly, for Microsoft SQL, you
have the opportunity to continue running your own Microsoft
SQL on Windows in our Google Compute Engine
in a virtual machine.
Or we can help you migrate to SQL for Linux,
thus eliminating the need to pay for the underlying operating
system of Windows because Linux is free.
Or, if you want to get out of the business of managing
your own SQL server, we can help you
move to cloud SQL, where we were the fully managed service
offering, and you just need to tap in.
So a little bit of an overview on licensing
with a quick disclaimer.
This is guidance at best.
Please make sure that you check the details
of your individual Microsoft licensing.
So essentially, there are two models
for how you can take care of your Microsoft licenses
within Google Cloud.
The first is very easy and straightforward.
It's just pay as you go.
If you'd like to deploy a Microsoft Windows
Server in Google Cloud, when you're creating that VM,
you select the Windows Server image.
And that image will not only have the Windows Server
operating system, it will also have the necessary licensure.
And that gets billed on per second basis.
You spin it up, the billing starts.
You spin it down, the billing stops.
Similarly, for SQL server, if you'd
like to select one of our Windows images
that has SQL server already installed,
we can charge you per minute for the time
that that SQL server is up.
And then when that SQL server is down, the billing stops.
This is particularly useful for test or dev or staging
environments that don't need to run 24/7
that you want to be able to bring up and bring down.
Similarly, for other Microsoft applications like SharePoint
or Exchange, we leverage our third party partners that are
able to provide images and pay-as-you-go licensing
and cost.
For our BYO licenses, we offer our sole tenant nodes, which
we'll discuss in a moment.
Your eligibility to bring your own license
will still depend on your Microsoft licensure.
But where you are entitled to bring your licenses,
our sole tenant nodes allow you the place
to do that with dedicated hardware.
SQL server by the terms of your software assurance.
You have the ability to bring your SQL server licenses
wherever you'd like, as well as SharePoint and exchange
in other Microsoft applications.
This is the use case for 24x7 applications,
where you need to keep them running all the time.
So some people have discussed October 2019 when
it comes to Microsoft licenses.
There was a change, based on October 2019,
for licenses purchased after that versus licenses purchased
before that.
For Windows Server licenses purchased
before October of 2019, as long as these licenses
were purchased prior to that--
or associated with larger agreements that
were created prior to that--
you should be able to bring those windows licenses
to GCP within the guardrails-- within the boundaries--
of your Microsoft license.
For SQL server, as long as you have software assurance,
you're able to continue to bring those licenses over to Google.
In order to make sure that we have all of our Is dotted
and Ts crossed, we've engaged the services of a third party
company called SoftwareOne.
SoftwareOne is a premier partner of both Google and Microsoft
and has provided us prescriptive guidance
on the details of Microsoft licensure.
And as you can see in both cases, Windows Server and SQL
server, there is likely a path to be
able to bring those licenses over.
One of the requirements for being in compliance
with Microsoft licensing is the ability
to generate a report of the operating
system and the servers that they're running on.
Google takes that complexity away
by providing these reports for you on demand.
As I mentioned, sole-tenant nodes.
Sole-tenant nodes mean that you have
sole control over the underlying hardware
for the virtual machines that you're deploying.
You can mix and match Linux and Windows VMs
on those sole-tenant nodes.
But, in addition, you can flip a switch
that allows you to trigger a CPU overcommit.
Essentially, what that means is you
make it appear as though there's twice as many CPUs
available on that host.
And for those applications that are not overly resource
intensive, it allows you to pack twice as many VMs
onto that same hardware.
So you can get much more cost-effective use
of that underlying hardware that you're now using.
Custom VMs are an outstanding tool for SQL server.
So SQL server is licensed by CPU,
but is very, very RAM hungry.
For many Cloud providers, what that means is, in order
to get the additional memory that SQL wants,
you have to increase your VCPU count.
Meaning you're not only being charged for the CPU cores,
but you're also having to pay licensure for SQL and Windows
for those additional use that you really don't need.
With custom VMs and GCP, we allow
you to scale that RAM and CPU core separately so that you
can create that custom shape that's
going to give you the optimal amount of RAM for your SQL
Server or other applications while still not
having to overpay for CPUs that you don't actually need.
Windows Server 2008 is another topic
that we frequently hear from our customers.
Windows Server 2008 R2 has gone end
of life, which means that Microsoft
will no longer provide security updates or patches for it
without having to purchase potentially expensive
extended security updates.
Migrate for Compute Engine allows
you to take those 2008 R2 servers from your data center
and, in the process of migration,
actually upgrade them in flight, so that when they land in GCE,
they land as 2012 servers, which is a fully supported operating
system.
That is provided at no cost to our customers.
By using the different tools and technology
that Google provides, optimizing your per second billing,
being able to shape the custom VMs,
taking advantage of preemptible VMs, so for those workloads
that just need episodic access to compute,
you can spin them up and spin them down
at a greatly reduced price.
We also have an ongoing recommendation system
where you can see at a VM by VM level
what the recommendations are for scaling up or scaling down
based on your actual utilization of those VMs,
allowing you to right-size your spend and right-size
your utilization of resources.
Let's talk a little bit now about modernizing.
So some of the ways that we help you modernize around SQL.
By moving to SQL on Linux, for example,
you remove the underlying need to license the Windows
operating system.
By moving to Managed SQL, you don't
have to pay the SQL license costs at all
because all of that is managed within our cloud SQL offering.
And by moving that responsibility of management,
we may even be able to help you move from enterprise
to standard to web.
And, as you can see, moving from server enterprise to SQL
server standard can be a tremendous cost savings.
Being able to move all the way to SQL server web
can be a phenomenal cost savings.
Windows Server containers in GKE.
This is our ability to support Windows containers--
that can either be spun up from scratch
or can come over as a result of our Migrate for Anthos tool--
that can pick up your VMs from your data center
and deliver them as containers in Kubernetes.
One of the best advantages of containerizing
these applications is license cost.
With your Microsoft licenses, once the underlying VM host
has been licensed for the operating system,
you can deploy as many containers
on top of that operating system as the hardware will support.
So, again, this provides much better bin packing,
much greater efficiency, much more cost
effective use of the resources you're already paying for.
Our managed service offering for Active Directory
allows you to get out from under the burden of having
to manage your Active Directory infrastructure
and still be able to use it as the security and profiling tool
that you want to be able to use it for.
Typically, what we see when we sit down and we work with
customers on optimizing their costs once they've moved
their Microsoft workloads into GCP is we can see as much
as a 50% cost savings by blending your BYO licenses
and your pay-as-you-go licenses, by being able to take advantage
of the CPU overcommit, and using some of the other tools
and technology that Google provides,
which allows you to then take that savings and reinvest it
in your transformation.
This is where you really want to end up
when all is said and done.
This is moving into Cloud Native.
This is moving into open source.
This is what gives you the scalability and the flexibility
that really underpin your digital transformation.
So being able to move from SQL Server to PostGres or MySQL,
or helping you migrate your .NET for Windows applications onto
.NET Core that runs on Linux, or even just containerizing
your .NET applications, so you can start making incremental
steps towards containerization.
Using our Google Kubernetes engine or, possibly,
even going into Anthos.
Ultimately, we want to be able to partner with you.
To look at your Microsoft workloads and help you identify
which applications should be retired,
which ones can be migrated into GCP,
such as third party ISV applications,
which internally created applications are easy rewrites,
such as moving from .NET to .NET Core,
or which ones are going to be more complicated or that may
yield better results by moving into things like serverless,
through App Engine and Cloud Run, and then, ultimately,
what are the applications that you're just going to have
to maintain until their functionality is completely
replaced with other applications.
So, in summary, we want to help you
start at the left with your Microsoft workloads
and your Microsoft servers running
in your on-premises location, lift and shift and migrate them
into Google Cloud using our tools and technologies,
working with you to optimize and get the right balance of spend
for your compute and for your licensure,
and then, ultimately, help you through
your digital transformation into Cloud Native and open source.
Thank you, and we look forward to working with you
in the future.