>> Hey everybody, stay tuned today while I'm talking to
Brian about the operations management baseline,
and how it can really help you
manage your operations in the cloud.
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Welcome to the Azure Enablement Show.
In the show were having
technical conversations with Microsoft experts about some of
the common questions or concerns you
may have around your Cloud adoption journey.
Now in previous episodes,
we talked about how the Cloud Adoption Framework can
actually help accelerate your cloud adoption journey.
Today's episode we're focusing on
the operations management baseline.
To have that conversation with me,
I'm welcoming back Brian to the show.
Welcome to the show Brian.
>> Sarah, thanks for having me again.
>> Now, in the last show we talked
about the Operations Management Baseline,
which is part of the Cloud Adoption Framework
for manage methodology.
Why do customers need to think of it as baseline Brian?
>> Without having a rich baseline in place,
operations are at risk
and like we see from the classic Murphy's Law,
what can fail eventually will fail.
We have to prepare for that failure
and anything that we're operating,
whether it's in the cloud or on-prem.
An operations baseline gives us a lot of
those IT operations practices that we used on-prem,
but brings them forward to the cloud so that we can
keep Murphy's Law at bay and make things a little bit more stable.
>> I've had people mention this new product that we have Azure,
the Azure auto managed service.
I believe that can help with the baseline.
Is that correct Brian?
>> It definitely can, yes.
When we look at the principles of what's
in an operations baseline,
those are three key principles.
Let me switch over to slide deck here.
Inside of any operations baseline,
you have things like inventory and
visibility for monitoring, operational compliance,
for making sure things are patched and properly configured and
optimized and a general
way to protect and recover your environment.
Now, that baseline that we
built out inside the Cloud Adoption Framework was
then the inspiration for the product that
you just mentioned, Azure Automanage.
Now that's not a tool for everyone,
it's an opinionated approach to those three things
that is able to be deployed with a couple of clicks.
To be able to give you an automated operations baseline
to automate a lot of those protections that we've talked
about and minimize a lot of those potential outages by
making sure that you've got up-time monitoring,
you've got patching, you've got automated cost reductions,
and you've got a number of security best practices in place.
This really reduces your need to
produce your own operations baseline.
Now if that doesn't fit with you,
you can build your own, and that's what we'll talk about today.
>> Awesome. Now, there are system failures as you mentioned,
that's part and parcel of an IT department,
does this operations baseline help you
prepare or even prevent those system failures Brian?
>> It definitely can.
It's not the answer to everything.
Just like with auto manage ,
this is your starting point.
It's the most common denominator that you'll see to reduce risk.
Where we see the operations baseline come
in is the bulk of your portfolio.
If you're managing a 100s workloads,
a good percentage of them are going to get enough of an SLA
between what Azure already provides as a default SLA,
and the minimum protections that we
talked about in operations baseline.
There are other things that
you may need that would get into more of
the enhanced baseline or
more enhancements around a platform or a workload.
We have guidance inside of
the Cloud Adoption Frameworks' managed methodology to guide that.
You'll see the same type of guidance inside of
our Well-Architected Framework when
you get into the workload operations.
But they all stem from the same
practices we're going to talk about
today that will protect that bulk of your portfolio.
>> Some of the parts of this baseline are very different parts,
and I want to unpack those Brian.
The inventory and visibility potion of it,
what is that, and what gets deployed
within Azure to help you with this baseline.
>> Inventory and visibility is
our first tactical piece that we deploy.
Endless what we're looking for is making sure that
every asset that you have is inventoried and classified,
it's monitored, logins happening in the same way.
You're really understanding and looking for anything you
can do to improve stability performance, and general operations.
That's how we manage technical change,
because change is one of
the most common things that will cause those failures.
Reporting on and understanding the change is really important.
Over on the right, there's a number of
tools that you could use to really
improve that overall inventory and visibility.
The ones we suggest for
every single operations baseline are
two pretty easy tools, Azure Monitor.
This is going to give you the centralized logs and
metrics, alerts and dashboards.
It's going to let you set up that core of
your operations of giving you
visibility across everything that you have,
and then extending on monitor we suggest using Azure Advisor.
This gives very specific recommendations that you can act
on that will help improve things like
reliability, performance, and cost.
To really get that visibility
not just on where you are and what's changed,
but also what you can do to improve.
Those are the first two tools we start with,
but there's a whole host of others that you can use to
improve that overall monitoring,
visibility and inventory management.
>> That can show you what's going on and how to respond to changes.
What about compliance needs,
lots of organizations have different NVD in compliance needs,
I'm betting there's a part of the baseline that actually help to
answer that for the customers, is that right?
>> Yes, ma'am. Yeah that's one of
the most important disciplines in
the baseline is operational compliance.
Because just seeing things as a start,
but really where things start to break
down is in the actual maintenance.
One of the most common causes of any kind of
security breach or failure is just basic patching.
Update management is a challenge that customers
really struggle with when they're managing a portfolio.
We want to make sure that things are patched,
we also want to make sure the policies are enforced and that
any other compliance requirements are
automated to the best of their ability.
Using these type of approaches to make sure you've optimized
your environment for the maximum performance
per cost that you have,
we're really doing that through configuration
of that overall portfolio.
That's the general nature of operational compliance.
This is delivered through two key tools as well.
The first being update management,
which gives you that ability to automate patching for all of
your different assets out there to make
sure that you don't run into patching issues.
Also cost analysis, which lets you look across your portfolio to
identify areas where you really need
to optimize operations and reduce cost.
Because if you have a bunch of assets
that aren't reaching peak utilization and you
just want to pull them back a little bit to save some money
and really manage your budgets
across all of your different workloads.
>> What about those system failures
and recovering from those system failures Brian,
what does the baseline do for that part of the operations.
>> No matter what we do with
operational compliance and monitoring,
Murphy's law will strike,
so we have to prepare for failure.
When failure happens, that's when the protect and
recovery discipline really helps out.
The whole thought here is we want to make sure that
there's a consistent way to recover everything.
It can be based purely on Azure backup.
That's generally what we see from most customers,
is making sure that you've just got sound backups
all in one location that you can recover from in case of failure.
But we also include other things like Azure site recovery,
or really when we start to dig into more of
those workload level operations or even tech platform operations,
we start to look at active fail-over
so that we can use multiple different environments,
and recover across multiple locations.
That can be done through site recovery
or modifications to the overall architecture.
Site recovery again is a really big one
for making sure that you've got that fail-over
potential if Azure Backup isn't
quite enough and you need something to respond a little quicker.
>> The baseline sounds great Brian,
but again I'm thinking to workloads and
organizations that may need more than the baseline.
If that's not enough the baseline,
how do you add to or can you even add to this baseline?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
Everything we talked about inside of
the managed methodology deals on the baseline.
It's also built with the intent on
refining settings and to various different degrees of operations,
or using complimentary frameworks like
the well-architected framework to get into workload operations.
We start with the baseline,
we secure the vast majority of your portfolio,
and then we start to evaluate what means more of
an enhanced baseline and a particular subscription.
What needs more specific platform operations from central IT,
and what needs workload operations that may have
dedicated staff just to that workload.
All of this guidance we're talking
about inside the operations baseline
establishes those disciplines that'll
scale out and to all of these different directions.
Starting here is a great way to move
forward with those richer operational needs.
>> Awesome. That's actually goods Brian.
In terms of if I wanted to get started
with my operations baseline today,
is there some way I can go ahead to get
some more information and guidance to start up.
>> Yeah, we provide a link in the commentary below,
but inside of the Cloud adoption frameworks managed methodology,
there's an Azure server management best practice guide.
You can follow that guide and
build out your own operations baseline.
If you follow that guide the way it looks today,
you'll end up with a product very similar to auto-managed,
like you talked about earlier.
With just using that as a starting point,
there's additional best practices in
that mythology that you can use to
extend that or customize that fit your own unique needs.
>> Awesome. Thank you again,
Brian for walking me through this baseline.
I really do appreciate your time,
and thank you to everybody that's tuned
in to the show as well as Brian said,
we'll be posting more information in the description box below.
Make sure you head there,
and also stay tuned for
future episodes of the Azure enablement show.
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