Hey friends, did you know that you can manage hundreds of
customers, thousands of subscriptions and millions of
resources all within a single control plane? Archana is here
to show me how with Azure Lighthouse will see how service
providers are delivering managed services using comprehensive
management tools in Azure today on Azure Friday.
Hey friends, I'm Scott Hanselman in its Azure fried him here with
Archana Balakrishnan. We're talking about Azure Lighthouse.
How are you?
Fantastic. How are you Scott? I'm very well. I'm learning all
kinds of fun things on Azure Friday and I love it when people
bring me cool things. An Azure lighthouses, one of those
because it let's you manage things at scale. What is the
problem that Azure Lighthouse
solves for people? So partners do amazing things on Azure and
really we have a built Azure always for enterprises and with
Azure lighthouse, what we're trying to do is address the
needs of those partners, right? Partners who are managing
hundreds of customers, how could they have a comprehensive
management tool natively in Azure to manage maybe thousands
of subscriptions and millions of resources? It helps them
automate game visibility.
And drive efficiencies to Delaware. Those services for
their customers. Interesting. So if I were theoretically planning
to. I don't know quit the company. Become an Azure
provider. I want to become like maybe I want to help a mom and
pop shop. I want to make people successful on Azure, but I feel
that maybe them signing up for Azure would be too complicated.
Could I potentially use Azure Lighthouse as someone who would
provide those services and kind of give them to other people?
Absolutely yeah you wanna go and sign up maybe as a partner on
our Microsoft Partner Network and then think about what kind
of customers you want to acquire? Typical mom and pop
shop probably wants to go with a cloud solution provider model so
you could very easily register as a cloud solutions provider,
set up an Azure subscription, purchase an Azure subscription
on behalf of your customer.
Uh, and let's say this customer really loves the services that
you Delaware. Do you back up everything on time and make sure
their security updates were in in order and then lo and Behold,
in a week you have 200 customers lining up. You were still a
small services provider and now suddenly you have to scale to
serve these 200 customers. That's really where like house
comes in and helps you Delaware. Those managed services at scale
across all of these customers.
That sounds like that's not that's my new retirement plan.
Azure lighthouses now here to what I'm going to do after this.
Cool so can you show me what that looks like absolutely. So
here I'm I'm basically logged in as a customer so I work for
Microsoft an I want to go about looking for some of these
service providers like yourself maybe who are going to go an
offer some interesting managed services for me?
So one of the routes, uh, with which I can discover some of
these service providers, is the marketplace, and so I could go
to the Azure marketplace and look for what are known as
managed services offers with lighthouse. The cool thing is
that you don't necessarily need to go the managed services
route. Let's say you're already working with a partner who is
extremely trusted partner of yours that you could follow this
exact same procedure with arm templates. An onboard to that
partner. Uh, but kind of coming back to the marketplace route. I
like this partner. They're giving me monitoring, management
services and so I kind of need to do is go in here and grab you
their offer itself, right? I could say I'm interested in
purchasing managed services for monitoring, and really this is
the Magic of lighthouse, right? So with lighthouse what I'm
doing is I'm giving this partner or certain level of access.
To my customer subscriptions. So all I do is I click create there
and by doing that I'm basically trusting this partner up to now
manage my resources and so as that partner is getting added I
can just skip through and show you what that would look like.
As a customer I would now be able to view all of the partners
who are serving me, right? I may actually have multiple partners
who are serving me an.
Particularly, maybe what I want to do is I want them to manage
very specific stuff. So initially maybe when I don't
trust the partner as much, I'm going to ask them to maybe
manage it dev subscription alone, right? So I could get
very granular and ask them to manage a very small
subscription. For example, right? I could even get as
granular as resource groups and so with this basically what I'm
doing is I'm giving this partner very, very specific access.
To my customer environment and so now it's gone. I'm actually
going to switch over to um, become an play. The role of a
service provider. So I'm here now. Logged in as rally cloud
managed services Ann, I want to go in here and go and look at
all of these customers that I'm managing right? And so I would
just pretty much go and look at these customers. I would be able
to see all of these customers from that single control plane.
Right no longer having to log out. Log into customer one, log
out, log into customer 2 right. There is now a single token that
works across all these customers and so in here you can see that
I'm managing contoso Microsoft wingtip toys global wineries. I
can drill down and look at exactly specifique scopes that
I'm managing, right? So, for example, Microsoft's asked me to
manage this library subscription
of theirs. A man so I know that Microsoft has given my global
admin contributor access and then someone called Megan just
reader access right? The cool thing about this is you can have
named people have very specific access or you could have groups
right? So let's say I have an architect's group and tomorrow's
cock wants to quit his job and common work for my partner write
an I hire him as an architect.
All I kind of need to go and do is add him to this group and he
immediately gets access to all of those customer environments,
right? It's as simple as that and this is a huge benefit for
both partners and customers. Customers can did you know,
don't want to have their environment exposed? Wotif, Rob
leaves MSP one and I no longer want drop to have access to all
of those customers scopes, so pretty much what I.
Come in here and do is delete drop from this group and he
would no longer have access. So again very specific access. Very
easy to manage, no overhead and truly kind of giving you that
single control plan again to look across all of your
customers, but that's not the only stuff you can do In
addition to kind of managing Azure environment. You can also
manage on premises environment, you can manage other clouds as
well through this. So here's an
example. Right, so this is a. This is a customer subscription
that Microsoft has delegated to me and within that subscription
itself you can see it's that same library subscription that
Microsoft delegated to me as a managed services provider. I
actually went into my on
premises datacenter. Installed an agent on these machines out
there and so these are actually machines that are sitting in my
on premises datacenter that for Microsoft that I as a partner
I'm now able to manage right so I could do cool things like
leverage all of the inbuilt tooling, the amazing management
tooling that's built into Azure like policies for example and be
able to go and audit all of these VMS that are not maybe set
to a specified time zone.
Right, and I see, for example, that this particular machine in
that data center is not compliant than I could go and do
the right thing for this customer and make sure that the
VM is set to that time zone. So with Azure lighthouse you now
have a single and unified control plan, not just to manage
your Azure resources, but your resources across on premises
environments across all kinds of data centers. Another clouds,
even right. Similarly, you can kind of get this single pane of
glass views. Uh, so previously, maybe the way I organized my
team was to go customer by customer and look at what are
the high issues impacting customer want today. Now with a
single pane of glass, I don't have to invest in building these
complex scripts and dashboards. I natively log into Azure
security center and I'm able to view what are the 18 high
severity recommendations that Azure is throwing up for me.
Right and now I can really organize my team to say hey,
this is the team that's gonna go and tackle these 18 high
severity issues across all of the customers I managed. So
really a very efficient way for you to Delaware services avoid
the need for repetition across customers and really also drive
a lot of automation, efficiencies and cost savings,
right? One of the features that are partners love Scott is this
thing called back up right. This is just an example of a backup
workbook, so you could go to any backup Walt. So these walls
exist in your customers codes and then you would pretty much
go and click on Black, back up Explorer and it would launch a
workbook like this, right? With this workbook. What I'm doing is
I'm looking at Azure environments that are managed.
Across all of these customers, across all of these
subscriptions and scopes, and I'm able to very quickly go and
say across all these customers, where is back up not enabled,
which particular jobs have field right? Are there any alerts that
I need to go and look at? For example, right? And so clearly
I'm doing a great job because I don't have any alerts, but I can
go and look at more details and this really is that again, kind
of coming back to that messaging of Azure Lighthouse helps you
truly manage. Azure Environment at scale. It gives you the
single pane of glass views. It allows you to automate
deployment. It allows you to view and manage customers at
scale. How do people do this before? Did they just have to
open new tabs in Incognito mode and remember it doesn't
passwords? I mean, how would you manage thousands of some things
before? Previously we you know we have what are known as guest
users, right? So typically every customer goes in and adds guest
users on behalf of the partner. So imagine your company had 25
employees and you had 100 customers, right? So each
customer is going and adding those 25 employees as guest
accounts and then Rob decides to leave. They need to go and
delete. Rob part was really were doing this with either through
scripting, right? So they wrote these amazing scripts that it
log in, log out, log in, log out
which. Not so secure. Uhm and expensive to maintain, right?
They kind of have to keep up to speed with a change. Is making
sure that every time a customer on boards like there on boarded
to the right we a lot of scripting. Pretty much with how
partners achieve this before an investing in expensive tooling
to create these single pane of glass views right? All of which
now is bringing the power of the management platform in Azure to
you directly. The lighthouse and you and the lighthouse team. You
all work through like hundreds of user voices. You talk to
partners to understand exactly what they needed so that they
could then refactor their business processes by
subtracting like you don't want them running scripts. They need
this feature and you don't want them doing Incognito mode tabs.
They need this feature so that lighthouse team is always
listening to make sure that the features in lighthouse mirror
the business processes that they're trying to Automate.
Absolutely, we talked to partners day in day out. That's
what we love to do. It's in our
DNA. A man in fact like a lot of enterprise customers, are also
actually using Azure Lighthouse to manage their crazy number of
environments that they may be acquired through emines right
through these partner feedback forums we realize kind of three
things right? One is partners have different kinds of
relationships with customers. They kind of have. You know they
choose a different licensing model so our product is built on
the principle of we will be agnostic licensing models.
They want to still keep the automation. They may not want to
write long scripts, but they still want everything to be
automated. what I showed you today was it demo in a GUI
right? Which is not typically how partners operate. They'll
still like to Automate a lot of stuff and with lighthouse, our
principle is do APIs 1st and bring UI to parody, right? So we
always give partners and choice for automation and then like you
said, finally we are all about leveraging what's natively in
the platform, so you don't need to go and spend a whole chunk of
money. Now are learning you tool sad and scale up your stuff?
It's all built into Azure. It's backed by Azure. It's backed by
Azure idiots. It's gonna work across 100,000 million billion
customers. So that's the value proposition of Azure lighthouse.
And that catch phrase that single pane of glass as you
said, it's the API level first and then the UI on top of that,
so that pain of glasses APIs that one could go and Automate.
So anything that you could do with one customer, you can do
now for N plus one customers.
Absolutely, and we've in fact found that partners use Azure
Lighthouse for onboarding their customers typically cut that on
boarding time by more than 80%. So you are now able to on board
setup this customer and really move on today to write what
other innovative services can I give this customer and the
partners that we listen to say hey, I spend that time learning
about all of the other amazing stuff Azure keeps throwing at me
so that I can go in Delaware more value to my customers. Very
cool. Could you show me real quick where people would go to
learn more about? Azure lighthouse sure, uhm the best
place to go to hisazure.com/lighthouse and we
have pretty good docs. We in fact recently launched to learn
module as well so we would love for you to give it a shot and
give us feedback. Fantastic, I am learning all about how to
manage my environments at scale with Azure Lighthouse today on
Azure Friday. Hey, thanks for watching this episode of
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