(bright music)
- Hi all, I'm Anant Sundaram.
I've been working on Azure since it's inception,
and it's been an amazing ride.
In my current role, my team and I work
on several Azure migration and modernization initiatives.
And today, I'm thrilled to be hosting
two Azure engineering experts from our Fasttrack team,
who have real life creds, working day in and day out
with many of you to help you adopt
and move to Azure successfully.
- Thank you, Anant.
Hi everyone, My name's Alejandra
and I'm a Senior Customer Engineer
here in the FastTrack for Azure organization,
where I specialize in infrastructure migration
and landing zone architecture design.
I have been doing this for, wow,
almost eight years now and have assisted
in migrations in landing zone designs of all sizes,
from just a few dozen servers to thousands of servers.
- It's great to be here Anant.
And thank you very much.
So I'm Colin and I am a Principal Engineering Lead
with our Azure FastTrack at Dev team in the Americas.
And my team's focus is at modernization, you know,
with our Azure PaaS platform.
So we cover compute services
like our Azure Kubernetes service, our Azure App service,
Azure API management, application identity
and services like that.
I've worked in the app dev space at Microsoft
for over 24 years now,
and actually like you Anant, I've worked with Azure
since its inception.
I was actually at the Professional Developers Conference
in Los Angeles in October of 2008,
when we rolled Azure out.
It was formally called Red Dog.
It was just web and worker roles in storage at the time.
Been using it ever since.
In FastTrack, I've actually helped customers modernize
and move their apps from on-prem to Azure PaaS services.
And I've also helped with born in the cloud
applications and building microservices based apps.
- Based on your experience, Alejandra and Colin,
what are some critical success factors
for successful cloud adoption?
Let's start with you Alejandra and then get to Colin next.
- Sure. Thanks Anant.
In my experience, customers who prioritize assessments
of their migratable state to understand early
in the planning stages of the migration,
many things such as what is supported
by Azure VMs and managed disks,
what optimization can be done
to Azure VMs and managed disks.
What groups of servers should be migrated together
and the priority order in which these groups
of servers should be scheduled in migration waves,
typically result in the most successful migrations.
Actually for one of our largest customers in Canada,
who I worked with Colin on,
they were looking at modernizing their
on-premises environment to paths and containers.
However, it worked best for them
to move to a migration strategy first
that tackled an infra migration for practical reasons really
such as to minimize change management for their employees
and the culture to get used to Azure first through IS,
then tackle the modernization once in Azure.
Another reason, the customer change to a migration to IS
versus PaaS and containers was their timeframe,
as their data center contract was expiring
and they needed to avoid renewal of these contracts.
- Along with Alejandra, I also worked
on that Canadian customer example that she mentioned
as basically they had a whole number of .NET
and also Java applications that were written
against SQL server and also Postgres backends.
And they wanted to modernize those
and move those to our PaaS platform as a first option.
That was their goto option for modernization.
Like this Canadian customer,
we actually have other customers,
who we've seen successfully kind of modernize their apps
and they typically prioritize kind of the following.
I think the first thing to prioritize is really planning.
You got to plan for modernization
by selecting the apps that are most important
to your business.
That's critical.
Ask the question, is this app worth investing in?
And then follow up from there.
The second thing would be assessments.
You need to assess if the app can actually run
in a cloud platform like Azure.
Most applications can.
Look at the development language, look at the database,
look at the operating system, skilling.
That would be another thing to prioritize.
You need to anticipate the scale
and the resiliency requirements,
given the cost constraints of the organization
and plan for future growth.
The agility of a managed app platform
that we've been talking about, really helps here
and being able to tweak these things
after you go to production
so you can scale and also drive down costs
when you need to.
Another thing that we see drive success
is the ability to containerize.
Obviously if appropriate, but when you do containerize
it provides a lot of flexibility and portability.
We see customers successfully do this
through things like CICD and DevOps for deployment.
- That was great Alejandra and Colin.
So next up, so based on your real life experiences again,
what are some common pitfalls
that customers should look to avoid as they move?
Let's again hear from you first Alejandra
and then we can move to Colin.
- Thanks Anant.
In my experience, common pitfalls
include poor prioritization of migration groups.
For example, prioritizing migration
of production versus development
and test environments, prioritizing complex workloads
running legacy operating systems
or with large amount of dependencies.
Another common pitfall is little to no testing
of migration groups prior to the final cutover.
It's best to uncover issues such as a VM
not booting in Azure, failed RDP access,
operating system level firewall restrictions
or licensing activation issues
prior to the cutover and not during the cutover window,
which is already a restricted space of time.
We typically want to uncover these potential issues
through test migrations, to an isolated temporary VNet.
Last but not least, a landing zone
is a very important component of any migration
to either IS or PaaS.
As some of you may know
a landing zone expands across various Azure technologies
in the governance and management and networking space.
So from a stakeholders alignment perspective,
it's a common pitfall to have unclear direction
and who will design or operate
or own the different areas in a landing zone environment.
It's important to have an answer prior
to the migration cutover to questions such as
how will servers be monitored?
How are they going to be backed up?
How are they going to be patched?
How are they going to be accessed
from on-premises or the internet?
Will traffic go through a central firewall
or bastion host among many other things?
I'll let Colin tell his stand on this.
- Thanks Alejandra.
So in my experience, we see some customers
that are really just not ready for things
like Kubernetes and AKS,
probably a little bit too advanced for them.
We see customers that are lacking the skills to properly
containerize a legacy app
and lacking sort of the operational expertise
to monitor and kind of support
that kind of the sophisticated platform.
So I've seen customers fail in certain circumstances
with technologies like Kubernetes.
For these instances and these kinds of customers,
we have simpler platform options that are often
a better fit organizationally.
Things like app services,
things like maybe Azure Container Instances,
another great service that's simpler to work with.
Or possibly even our upcoming in preview,
Container Apps for Service,
that'll go right at sort of these workloads.
Another kind of common pitfall with that modernization
during a move is properly planning for all the dependencies
that the application has like the databases,
the external interfaces.
For a large kind of multi-app migration project,
stakeholder alignment is always one of the biggest hurdles.
- That was really wonderful Alejandra and Colin.
I myself remember as an IT practitioner,
how the moment of cutting over to a new solution,
in this case Azure, represents real moment
of truth for our customers.
And I'm so glad that you folks work side by side
with customers in those critical moments.
Thank you. Next up.
Do you see customers who need to have some
of their workloads continue to run on premises,
any use cases that might need them to stay back
even as they're moving a lot of the workloads
to Azure and how have you guided such customers?
Colin, let's start with you on this one.
- Yeah. Thanks Anant.
And so I've worked with a large automobile manufacturer
actually last year, to solve an issue where,
that they had in their assembly plants.
So these plants, these assembly plants
for this manufacturer exist all over the world.
And inside of these plants,
they actually were running on-premise SQL servers
that house important assembly data
that actually must stay local for a whole bunch
of reasons inside of the plant.
It's been really hard for this customer
to manage all of those SQL instances around the world,
upgrading them, keeping them operationally
there and functional.
And so as a solution to kind of this challenge,
they leveraged Azure Arc for Kubernetes
to run Kubernetes clusters, locally inside of their plants.
And then to run all of those SQL instances
as SQL managed instances.
This is actually in preview today,
but what this did is it enabled the customer
to kind of manage all of those on-premises Kubernetes
and SQL resources through the Azure portal,
through Azure Arc.
And what this allowed them to leverage was
the power of the cloud.
They could then use the portal
to spin up new databases, for example.
They also had like built-in capabilities
like high availability, backup, and monitoring,
all part of that on-prem SQL, server managed instance
that they now were getting through the portal.
This gave them consumption based cloud billing,
another simplification of how they were doing it before.
And they in addition, got the power of Azure policy
for governance, as well as Microsoft Defender for security.
So this is a really great sort of set of cloud capabilities
that were now available to solve this manufacturing problem.
- That's great Colin.
And I do yes have quite a good amount of my customers,
which stay in a hybrid architecture,
where they concurrently manage their on premises
and Azure environments.
Some of these customers are looking to start POCs already
to leverage Azure Arc for servers,
mainly to onboard these on-premises servers
to Azure's control plane.
Actually about a year ago,
I helped this insurance company in Germany, POC,
the use of Arc for servers for a small group
of five test servers.
Their goal though was to eventually onboard an environment
of close to 2000 servers using Azure Arc
to leverage Azure update management and monitoring.
- Wonderful, thanks again, Alejandra and Colin.
The hybrid architecture that you mentioned
is coming up more and more with a lot of customers
and solutions like Azure Arc it appears are the way to go
for those multi-cloud edge and hybrid environments.
And now finally, a lot of our ISV customers
are looking to move their SaaS businesses to Azure.
So how does FastTrack for Azure help those ISV friends
of ours, SaaS enable their applications
and move successfully?
Colin this one is for you as well.
- Many of our ISV customers in FastTrack come to us
and ask us for guidance on how to
properly achieve multitenancy in their SaaS based solutions
that they're trying to enable.
This is a common architectural pattern and problem,
and we're actually providing lots of guidance here.
It's a hard problem given the obvious security,
privacy scale and resiliency concerns undoubtedly.
But what we actually had is some great document coverage
for this in our Azure Architecture Center,
where we covered the various Azure techniques
that can be used for this problem,
whether it's a single shared database
where you have all of your tenants in one database
or perhaps a database per customer scenario.
So the various different types
of problems are all kind of laid out in our guidance.
Secondly, FastTrack is currently building
a reference architecture led by our ISV team
to help jumpstart ISVs
that want to properly incorporate
these sort of common requirements
into some software that they want to build out.
So we're helping customers jumpstart here
and we'll be delivering something along those lines.
- Thank you, both Alejandra and Colin for joining,
and bringing to light
all this wonderful information and insights.
You know, the FastTrack for Azure team
has such wonderful experiences
of working with customers, which is always so valuable
and refreshing to hear right from the trenches.
We have tons of guidance and a great tool set
in Azure Migrate if you want to give it a shot yourself.
Or we have a comprehensive program
called the Azure Migration and Modernization Program
that offers you expert help, resources, and guidance
at each and every step of the way
and super easy to nominate yourself to it.
Just go to azure.com/AMMP
and just fill a few fields and you are in.
We look forward to seeing you leverage these great resources
for your next Azure migration and modernization project.
(lively music)