- Arc is in itself an opportunity
for transformational things within IT.
- Getting our teams a lot of time back
that they used to just roll up their sleeves
and get their hands dirty so to speak,
doing manually.
- One of the things I love about Arc to be honest is,
I can see how heavily it's being developed.
(logo swooshes)
- Hello everyone, thanks for joining us today.
My name is Jason Hansen and I'm the Lead PM for Azure Arc.
Now we're joined by a number of customers
who are using Azure Arc today,
Nelson and Nuno from Millennium bcp,
Ethan from Wolverine,
and Scott from Greggs.
And we'll jump in and ask them about their experiences
using Azure Arc.
(logo swooshes)
First, I'd like to introduce Nuno for Millennium bcp.
Nuno, can you introduce yourself
and tell us a little bit about Millennium?
- Sure, Jason.
So my name is Nuno Guedes,
I'm currently the Cloud Compute Lead at Millennium bcp.
Millennium bcp is a bank in Portugal,
it's the largest private bank in Portugal.
We've been using technology since we began in 1985
as a differentiator,
and creating value for our customers
and we continued on that trend to here,
to Arc for instance.
- Great, and you brought Nelson along as well.
Nelson, do you want introduce yourself?
- Sure, nice to meet you all.
So I'm Nelson, I'm the Manager for the Cloud team
here at Millennium bcp.
One of my team leaders is Nuno,
he's been in charge of
leading all this Azure Arc research and implementation
in the last year, year and a half so.
- Awesome, thanks for joining us.
And then to you, Ethan,
you're from Wolverine.
Why don't you introduce yourself as well.
- Yeah hi, my name's Ethan Brackley,
I'm the Vice President of Infrastructure and Services
at Wolverine Worldwide.
We're a global designer and manufacturer
of footwear and apparel,
and some of our most recognized brands include Chaco,
Sweaty Betty,
Sperry,
Merrell,
Keds, Saucony,
and Hush Puppies.
Glad to be here today.
- And I like that you had that list right off the top
that's good.
And we're also joined by Scott Clennell from Greggs.
Scott, why don't you introduce yourself
and tell us a little about Greggs.
- Hi Jason, yes I'm Scott Clennell,
I'm the Platform and Infrastructure Services Manager
here at Greggs.
Greggs is a large food on the go retailer within the UK.
We provide hot foods to customers nationally
across more than 2000 retail locations.
- That's awesome.
So you've got lots of stores
and lots of infrastructure to manage.
(logo swooshes)
Ethan, let's go ahead and start with you.
So how did Wolverine get started using Azure Arc?
- Yeah, sure.
So at Wolverine Worldwide
we really recognized the potential benefit
of managing things like patching and policy administration
across our hybrid environment in one tool set.
So yes, started with Azure Arc
in order to help keep our on-prem
and Azure environments more closely synchronized.
- Awesome.
How about you Nuno,
how did Millenniums start with the Arc?
- So, we were at point where we needed
a single pane of glass
as well as configuration management
and policy management.
Just about the same time that Azure Arc
became a preview,
so good timeline there to just grab it and run with it
and deploy it and do very interesting stuff with it.
- Awesome, so really it sounds like you know lots of stuff
and lots of different places,
and a lot of jobs to be done
to wrap your arms around that management experience.
So, you mentioned policy and configuration management.
What attracted you there in terms of Arc?
- I'd say that we are,
because we are mainly focused on communities clusters,
being able to take advantage for instance of
the underlying open source projects,
like for instance Gatekeeper or Flex
that Microsoft has encapsulated within a service
brought us the peace of mind to even though
it's based on those common projects,
we know that we can count on an enterprise level support
and still do our thing,
but do it in a proper business model for us.
- How did your company get started with Azure Arc?
- Yeah, so I joined the
organization about 18 months ago,
and one of the challenges that I've got
to try and achieve
is to really modernize and transform our infrastructure.
We're currently a very on-premise,
and what I would think of is quite traditional
infrastructure provision for the business.
And we started with as Azure Arc
in order to try and broaden our knowledge
and our skillset around the as Azure platform
and management plan was really the first intention
of getting involved in Arc.
That gave us a little bit of visibility
into how we could and would manage infrastructure
in a more public cloud environment.
- Interesting, so a lot of on-premises
and data center assets,
and you're starting your cloud journey
and using Arc as a bridge to skill up your teams
with the cloud technologies.
- That's right.
What we saw Arc as being was exactly that it was a bridge.
So we don't have any public cloud delivery at the moment
but we saw Arc as a way of exploring public cloud
without actually going into public cloud.
And in particular, one of the big drivers for us with that
was that cultural change,
it was that cultural knowledge at a low risk.
We weren't moving business assets into public cloud
before we were ready.
- That's interesting.
And as you were started that journey at Greggs,
what services within the Azure Arc portfolio did you,
are you using or are you exploring?
- Yeah, so we started quite small.
We just started with the standard Arc Agent Deployment
and just really that initial visibility.
And we started that on a very small scale.
Maybe certainly less than 10% of our estate to start with.
We ramped that up quite quickly
because of actually the Microsoft,
we you'll be aware that there was
a security zero-day last year,
which was print nightmare.
A lot of people probably know about that one
and remember it well.
At the time we had no central patching infrastructure
we could push out patches,
but we couldn't install them.
Because we were still probably that little more traditional
in viewpoint that we need to test patches heavily.
But in this case we needed to deploy that patch very quickly
obviously across our entire estate.
So what we actually did at that point was
we went from a very, very small percentage of our estate
within our, to basically the entirety
of our windows service estate. - [Jason] (indistinct)
- 'Cause we decided actually
if we're going have to touch every server anyway
let's do that in terms of Arc Management,
rather than going on and doing every server patch manually.
So that then brought us into using update management
which was the driver behind that,
because then we,
that gave us that capability to do
not only the download centrally,
but actually the scheduling
and actual patching and restart, et cetera
of our entire estate from one single management plane.
And that was broadly very successful.
- Awesome, and so Ethan,
to you sounds like you're doing patch orchestration,
patch management?
Can you talk a little bit about,
a little bit more about that?
- Sure, yeah.
We're using Azure Policy,
we're also using Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
We're rolling out and getting acquainted
with Azure Monitor right now.
So very much same story for us.
We're looking for that single pane of glass,
one place to go manage a lot of things
across our environment.
We've rolled out Azure Arc
to over 500 of our on-prem servers
and using that to keep things in sync for us
has really been super valuable.
Getting our teams a lot of time back
that they used to just roll up their sleeves
and get their hands dirty so to speak, doing manually.
- And I think one of the things
that's interesting about Arc
is that we're attaching sort of Azure based management
into infrastructure that typically hasn't been
connected to the cloud.
And this could be interesting inside an organization.
So, you know,
as you're adopting Azure Arc,
what would your advice Ethan be to IT professionals kind of,
you know dipping their toe in this area.
- Sure, yeah.
I'd say it's a powerful tool.
Could make your life a lot simpler.
Definitely take some time to get to know it
see how you could utilize it in your environment
to streamline some of those operational tasks,
some of the more mundane work.
And frankly I think it could end up buying you back
some of that resource time
to spend on some higher and better use of time activities.
- Now, that's great.
Nuno or Nelson you know,
as you've embraced Arc inside your organization,
what advice would you have for other folks?
- I would say that one thing that I think
it went well for us
was strategically Nuno is in charge
of all our research and development.
So we wanted something that we could build
on our existing knowledge so we have
a local team that's becoming more and more knowledgeable
on managing Azure and wanted to build on that.
But it takes a process of growing maturity
and you need to have some sort of resourcing available
so people can try,
can test,
can fail,
can learn to deploy before you go live
with such an important,
an important tool set.
So that's why we,
what I would advise is get somebody
that goes ahead of your team
and starts to learn things before you,
to get your maturity up to speed
to then you perform larger deployments.
- Okay, so start small,
kind of build a framework. - Yup.
- Explore, fit to purpose and then bring that back
to the organization.
- Create some room for failure and learning.
So you can, then you can build on whatever you learnt.
- That's great, because that is one of the things
that we really think about a lot is meeting customers
where they are with their infrastructure
and their IT assets,
and really being able to get that quick win,
you know in your example, it's inventory
bringing a list of everything.
That's hard for a lot of customers.
And then you can add it as set of scenarios.
It's also great to hear that,
you know patch management and orchestration
is one but it sounds like you've also added monitoring
and security really kind of pulling together
that total enterprise view in Azure.
That's awesome to hear.
- Yeah, no absolutely
and you know again,
I think for us as well
a lot of organizations will have that,
the problem with traditional infrastructure
of it's very very heavily reliant on documentation
which isn't always where it should be,
let's be honest by everyone.
And the visibility that I think Arc gave us or,
you touched on monitoring there
so obviously integrates into is your monitor
and log analytics.
And that actually has given us the ability
to start to really drive much faster business change
because we can now view dependencies on services
that we're looking at decommission.
Whereas before we couldn't do that,
that would be a long exploratory exercise.
Whereas now we can look at a server and say, right
we can see exactly which clients,
or which servers are actually accessing now,
and really speed up that time to decommission,
which for us is a key element in driving forward
as we do look towards a more public cloud
and hybrid cloud approach
because we're keen not to take the,
some of the things that we shouldn't let's say,
with us on that journey.
We want to really consolidate that infrastructure first.
So, you know the,
and one of the things I love about Arc to be honest
is I can see how heavily it's being developed.
So when we started on this journey
it was really a couple of components,
a couple of features within there,
but even in the nine months or so
that I think we've really been on this journey.
We've seen the VMware piece come in,
we've seen the security piece get integrated.
We're interested to see what we do
with things like Key Vault
which we know available in there.
You know, this is clearly heavily developed
and really extends that capability set
to our on-premise infrastructure.
And that's great to see,
you know, it's not just the fact that it's a good product
but the roadmap is really, really strong.
And actually it's listening to us as customers I think,
because what we are getting here
are things that I would ask for,
which is great.
- Yeah, no that's great.
And you know, as you mentioned
we do have a robust roadmap
and we're definitely listening to customers
and their scenarios as they go on this journey
as you're running IT infrastructure in a hybrid way
and you know, even modernization and application development
are all squarely in scope.
So glad that you're on the journey with us.
In terms of looking forward to the next three to five years,
maybe both for your team at Greggs,
but also more broadly in the IT industry.
What challenges do you see coming down the road over
the next three to five years?
- Yeah, I think just deployment and maintenance tasks
being simplified and streamlined
has been a big deal.
It's getting us from kind of a idea to solution
a lot faster,
which is a huge benefit.
And by the way currently we're all familiar I'm sure with
some of the lead times associated
with physical equipment
really frankly cuts out just a ton of cycles
for our project teams,
not having to wait on hardware or gear to show up
in order to provision something
and have something really rapidly deployed.
- And just so start with what you've got
and really leverage that cloud based,
the cloud-based workflows, get going.
- Absolutely. - Awesome.
You know and so I think hybrid feels like it's here to stay,
you know, again lots of stuff,
lots of places today
and seems like we're adding lots of more places
and more apps,
more infrastructure to run.
As you think about kind of the IT challenges
that you're facing today,
what do you see on the horizon
for the next three to five years for your organization,
for hybrid management in general,
Ethan we'll go ahead and throw that to you.
- Yeah for us being in the footwear and fashion industry,
it's all about speed.
For us that could be just like I was mentioning a minute ago
speed to solution,
or speed for a product to market.
As far as that translates into how our technical teams work
us getting solutions stood up with speed
is gonna continue to be something
that's absolutely critical to us
in order to implement solutions
that are really gonna effectively
and positively affect our consumers.
So, tools like Azure Arc and the tools within it
are gonna continue to be huge leverage opportunities
for our technical staff.
- No, that's great.
Speed is the name of the game
and I don't see anything slowing down.
- No, definitely not.
- Yeah.
How about Nuno for Millennium?
What are the challenges that you're looking at
over the next three to five years?
- I think well,
speed is naturally one of those, for sure.
We are moving towards the scenario
where we look at our workloads
growing faster in terms of deployment time.
And like for instance, in one week
having something from whiteboard to production.
But not only that but being able to do that
wherever that needs to run
either being it on-prem in Cloud Provider, A, B, C,
wherever we're located.
And so for instance our initiative
also with Azure Tech HCI
to connect it with Arc as as a tool there,
but, and also as an example,
for a way that we are moving forward on
to create that universal configuration,
that universal set of
design principles
that we just enforce everywhere.
Mostly with Arc and related features,
so that we can run a workload today on-prem,
tomorrow in Azure,
the next day somewhere else,
just to make sure we are generating as much value
with it as we can.
- Yeah, that's great.
Consistency for IT Operators,
consistency for application developers
really kind of the name of the game there.
That's great.
You know, I'm curious you know,
last kind of words of advice or thoughts
that are top of mind for you, Ethan,
as a user of Arc,
any last words?
- I would say definitely check it out.
You know, for us it's been a huge uplift standardization
like Nuno is just saying huge benefit for us
along with the speed of deployment,
and one place to look,
makes it so much simpler for our administrative teams.
- Awesome, Nuno, Nelson,
any last thoughts?
- I would say that for us Arc is in itself an opportunity
for transformational things within IT.
It's an excuse to do something different, probably better.
So, give it a shot.
- Awesome, well thanks folks for taking some time to,
you know to meet with us
and talk about your experience with Arc.
And I can't look,
I can't say how excited I am to see what you do with it
going forward.
Thanks everybody.
- You're very welcome.
- Thank you.
- It was a pleasure.
- Thanks.
(upbeat music)