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>> We've been talking a lot about
cloud native apps and the
fact that they can run anywhere.
One of the ways they can run anywhere is by using
AKS on Azure Stack HCI
and we'll discuss that with Ben Armstrong.
Ben, how are you?
>> I'm good Olivio.
Great to be here today to chat you about this.
>> Well, thanks for your time.
Before we get into the topic,
can you give a little introduction about yourself?
Who are you and what are you doing these days?
>> Happy to do so. Hi, I'm Ben Armstrong.
I'm actually Group Program Manager
for AKS on Azure Stack HCI.
Now, a lot of folks know me as
someone who's worked in virtualization forever.
If you've worked on Hyper-V,
you've probably come across my name.
But for the last couple of years,
I've been leading the team who's
been working on taking AKS,
a hugely popular Azure service,
and making it available for
customers to run in their data centers.
On Azure Stack HCI.
>> Nice, lots of acronyms.
Actually, I'd like for you to decipher some of them.
AKS Azure Kubernetes Service,
and HCI, Azure Stack HCI or?
>> The really easy way to think about this
is that we know that
a lot of people are investing in
modernizing their apps and
developing new cloud native apps.
In doing that, they're building
these applications using containers,
it's the way to do things these days.
AKS is our Kubernetes service
that makes it really easy to
take those containers and run them in production style.
When you're running these applications,
you're a business,
you need uptime, you need availability,
you need managing, you need monitoring.
AKS delivers all of that for you and lets you focus on
your app that's running in the containers on top of that.
Azure Stack HCI on the other hand,
is our offering for
running these services in your data center.
For our customers, you have
your physical servers either running in your data center,
running in your branch office,
running in your factory,
you install Azure Stack HCI,
install AKS on top of Azure Stack HCI,
and that allows you to run
your cloud native containerized
applications wherever you want.
>> Nice. At scale, clusterized,
thanks to Azure Stack HCI.
Why would someone actually want to do that?
We have a high-level idea,
but I think it would be good if
you can give us some examples of
customers who actually are onboarding on AKS,
on Azure Stack HCI and we'll talk about some
of the reasons why they are doing that.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
We've been working with a whole bunch of
customers over the last year.
We've been in preview for the last year and now at Build,
we're announcing general availability,
which is super exciting.
Through that, we've been actively working
with customers and at a high level.
I've really seen two patterns come out of our customers.
The first pattern is that we have customers
who are modernizing their company's infrastructure,
they've seen that cloud native
is the way to go and they've been
building new applications on Azure on AKS,
taking advantage of all the best and latest practices.
But then they encounter
a scenario where they really need to
take that application and run it in their environment.
Now, most of the time,
what causes this is that there is some piece of data
that application needs to interact with that
is hard to get up to the public cloud.
Or, maybe it's just a sheer size
of it. I had one customer that I was talking to where they
realized that they had petabytes of data running in
their data center that they needed to operate
on and they couldn't figure out how to make that work.
Another customer I talked to wanted to do
stream processing of data that was
coming from sensors in their factory.
It could be made to work
if they were running it on public cloud.
But it would be a lot more
efficient for them if they could take
that app and run it where the data was.
>> Would cost a lot of money sending
all that data up to the cloud anyways.
You don't want that and privacy issues and so on.
>> Yeah, there's a million things there.
There's cost, there's latency, there's privacy.
A lot of things cause people to think,
I need to run this app where the data is.
>> Yeah, you just mentioned an example of
a customer who have already adopted
AKS in Azure and wants to
bring these workloads on-premises.
But you also mentioned customers,
who are modernizing the datacenters.
Do you have an example of
any story of the customer doing that?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
I mentioned that we have two sets of customers,
and I talked about people who are building in
Azure and then having a need to run it locally.
The other set we see,
is we see customers who also
wanting to modernize working on their apps.
For them, the next step
that they're looking at is actually
refreshing their hardware that they have on their estate.
One of the key customers that we're
actually talking with at Build and
we have them in our session as a company, SKF.
SKF is right in the middle of this right now,
they were refreshing all their
hardware and their solutions that
they use in their environments.
As part of that, they've gone,
we have old hardware,
we need to replace the old hardware.
But we know that we want to be
modernizing and using
cloud native application design patterns.
They're using AKS HCI as part of that solution so
that even though they're making
this big investment in their premises,
they know that they can do so and build
new apps that will run just as well
in Azure as they will
in their data centers, factories, branch offices.
>> Brilliant. Whether you want
to modernize your infrastructure
or you want to bring
your cloud workloads developed on AKS,
on-premises, or AKS on Azure Stack HCI is for you.
What do you recommend our customers and
developers who want to get started?
What's the call to action here? What should they do?
>> One, we are GAing the service today,
which is super exciting.
Please get out there, try it, read it.
We have some great documentation up.
We have a 60-day free evaluation and an evaluation guide.
On top of that, in our evaluation guide,
we actually tell you how to try this out
in a virtual machine running on Azure.
If you do not have hardware ready in under an hour,
you can get up and running with a solution,
play with it and see how it works for you.
>> Perfect. Well, thanks, Ben.
You already know what you have to do. See you soon.