How to make the most of Microsoft Azure · Azure team for years on projects of all sizes. These...

DATACOM INTELLIGENCE

WHITE PAPERIssued: October 20th 2013

Datacom Group Limited | All content © Datacom 2016 | Available for release on request

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DATACO M I N T E L L I G E N C E

ISSUED April 2016

How to make the most of Microsoft Azure

2 www.datacom.co.nz | www.datacom.com.au

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The potential speed, agility, scalability and cost benefits of public cloud, available through its automation, hyper-scale computing, utility model and self-management of everything-as-a-code, make it compelling to many organisations, including Datacom. Gartner analysts forecast the worldwide public cloud services market will continue growing this year, by 16.5%, reaching US$204 billion by the end of 2016.

Microsoft Azure is a public cloud platform that provides an extensive range of IaaS- and PaaS-based services and supports many programming languages, tools and frameworks. Azure’s PaaS offering is arguably the most advanced of the global public cloud providers, and the platform has better geographic coverage than any competitor, with 19 data centres worldwide. According to recent data from Synergy Research Group (Feb 2016), although Azure had a 9% share of the worldwide cloud infrastructure services market in 2015, its year-on-year growth was 124%.

Datacom is a Tier-1 Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider across NZ and Australia. We are also an award-winning Microsoft partner across other areas, including networking, servers, storage, devices, applications and security.

We have worked in partnership with Microsoft’s Azure team for years on projects of all sizes. These include what is still the world’s largest production SAP migration to Azure, for Zespri International, one of the most successful horticultural marketing companies globally.

“This project improved Zespri’s ability to do business on a global scale, and extended the limits of what is possible on Azure,” says David Duffy, Associate Director – Midlands at Datacom. “Itinvolved Datacom building, fromthe ground up, over 400 virtualservers. The team now manageZespri’s infrastructure aroundthe globe, 24x7, with significantautomation applied.”

Sunny Katira, Associate Director – Microsoft/Azure at Datacom, says that Azure becomes particularly compelling in the context of Microsoft’s overall ecosystem of products, services and partners, and its major presence in many organisations around with world.

“For one thing,” he says, “those organisations that already use Microsoft products and services have a head start when it comes to switching to the many native Azure software services, such as Office 365 Exchange Online and Azure Active Directory, and getting the added benefits of using them as SaaS.” Yet, over the years, Datacom has encountered organisations using Azure but not getting hoped-for results. Usually, this is because they have pursued its benefits by engaging with the environment in traditional ways, suited to the on-premise era.

This paper aims to help current and potential Azure customers alike to update their approach and get the most out of the platform. It contains 10 sections that:

• raise important issues that organisations need to consider,

• outline problems they need to overcome, and

• specify changes they need to make.

How to make the most of Microsoft Azure


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1. Plan first

Making the most of any public cloud requires preparation. Ad hoc adoption and lack of strategic planning can lead to, among other consequences, stalled projects, costly changes in direction or solutions that don’t meet business needs. So Datacom urges organisations to build at least some kind of plan for the adoption and management of Azure.

Ideally, you’ll create a coherent way to bring different services, workloads, architectures and processes together, according to a central strategy that aligns with and supports organisational goals and the overall vision. For Datacom advice, and a framework, on how to build such a strategy and plan refer to our paper, Defining The Right Cloud Strategy And Plan For Your Organisation (Feb 2016).



According to Datacom customer research presented in Before You Go Public, Read This (Oct 2015), few organisations are currently planning to go ‘all in’ to public cloud like Zespri, and will, therefore, retain some of their workloads on-premise or in private cloud. Many services are, and will be for the foreseeable future, delivered via applications or workloads with a hybrid set up. For example, an organisation may want to use Azure for a front-end application that needs elasticity, and use a private cloud for the interconnected database.

Hybrid cloud architecture, however, requires careful management and planning to account for key factors such as latency, security and compliance, as well as potential added complexity and transition costs.

“Making hybrid cloud work well means focusing on integration and interconnectedness, especially in the planning stages of a project. For instance, if an organisation stretches certain components by running them in Azure, what is the impact on other, reliant components? These critical factors are sometimes overlooked,” says Brett Alexander, Solution Architect at Datacom.

On top of this, with greater adoption of public cloud (and proper planning), usually comes a corresponding service orientation and increasing focus on business services and related outcomes enabled by cloud. These outcomes may include risk or reputation management, reducing cost and making key services available when needed and at a suitable quality. They are often delivered through the aggregation of multiple providers, services and solutions – and various SLAs.

Making these services and outcomes happen and managing the many moving parts involved is clearly an important function and a complex task, which organisations can take on themselves or outsource, at least in part, to a qualified partner like Datacom. Whatever the approach taken, there is a growing need for those in the organisation involved in Azure to understand the way different clouds and related services interact and how they can be integrated – with each other and with other environments and types of IT.

2. Face complexity



It’s contradictory, but part of the solution to the problem of added complexity described above is one of its key contributing factors: public cloud. That is, optimising Azure and reaping the potential flexibility, scalability and agility rewards on offer requires organisations to, among other things, automate and standardise many IT processes.

This does mean conforming to the standards of the platform, but remember that Azure is global state-of-the-art infrastructure and services. And in doing so, organisations position themselves to get the best performance and value from the platform, and to better manage increasing complexity, at speed.

This conformity can make for a more reactive relationship than many organisations are used to, but this is a minor drawback compared to the benefits available. What this conformity means in practice across operations and development is outlined below.

3. Embrace conformity



In cloud operations, a new method of engagement is necessary to match the tectonic shift in focus from hardware to software that public cloud engenders. With Azure, engineers no longer have direct access to infrastructure, so they view servers through the Azure Portal and use software, such as PowerShell, to control things. This means some people may need to adopt a new mentality and update their skills substantially. They need to move away from traditional, manual methods of monitoring and control to using scripts and coding to enable process automation and managing by exception.

For example, where server outages in on-premise or even highly virtualised environments are seen as a problem to be investigated or rectifi ed, in Azure machines may be switched off at any time when they are not needed.

As automation progresses, engineers steadily remove manual intervention and human error. In doing so, they can free themselves up to have control over more of their organisation’s estate – and better handle increasing complexity. They can also be more proactive and strategic day to day, moving from run-and-operate thinking towards an innovation and value-add mentality. That is, they can get more involved in higher-value activities, such as capacity planning and service management and delivery.

Of course, this need to change may be reduced if much of the management is outsourced to a third party, but there will always be a learning curve of some kind required to ensure the business can make the most of its partner’s or partners’ services and support. And note that there is often understandable resistance to these changes. Therefore, change management is a crucial aspect of any transition to Azure and a key consideration to build into cloud strategy and planning.

4. Adopt a new mentality



A common way organisations drive ever more value out of Azure is by adding speed and agility to application development and management. For example, a business may want to improve time-to-market by using Azure to speed up previously month-long release cycles into weekly cycles. However, as per Datacom’s recent paper, From the Cloud Face: Ten Lessons on Adoption and Management (March 2016), this needs to happen without losing requisite standards, discipline, compliance and life cycle and financial management. In a nutshell, this means speeding up without breaking the business – finding a balance.

To make this happen, among other key changes, infrastructure people need to pare back normal ITIL-based processes and related standards somewhat to allow faster activity without losing too much risk mitigation and rigour. In addition, developers need to work faster than ever, but wrapped in enough protection and control to avoid disaster.

A primary challenge is that there is an historic divide between operations and development people and processes. But to get the most out of cloud, it’s important to integrate these areas as much as possible. That’s why Datacom usually recommends that organisations adopt a DevOps approach, at least to a degree.

Looking at development in particular, Azure makes tools available to support DevOps, agile and lean approaches, which can help speed up application release cycles and make development in an organisation a leaner, more agile and more iterative process – compared with the traditional ‘waterfall’ project-based method.

For example, Azure App Service is a fully managed platform with powerful capabilities such as built-in DevOps, continuous integration with Visual Studio Team Services and GitHub, staging and production support, and automatic patching. It combines and expands on existing capabilities from other services, such as Azure Biztalk Services, which in itself provides out-of-the box, cloud to on-premises and line-of-business application integration for SAP, Oracle EBS, SQL Server, and PeopleSoft.

As mentioned above, Azure supports an array of coding languages, including commonly-used languages such as .NET and SQL. Using the platform and its native tools in combination with a DevOps approach to developing cloud-ready applications for the platform can result in faster, cheaper and more efficient development processes compared with developing on-premise. Azure also has a very strong PaaS offering, giving organisations the ability to build applications even more rapidly by reducing the overall need for writing code.

As well building new applications, organisations can of course also rebuild applications to run on Azure, as Datacom has done for a wide range of businesses over many years.

5. Speed up



Although many enterprises will need to review and update their traditional, often ITIL-based, processes to maximise the value derived from Azure, ITIL is global best practice for a reason. Many of its principles and practices bring maturity, control and governance to processes, and are invaluable to the ideal operation of Azure within an organisation.

ITIL tools such as Problem Management and Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) are useful, as are basic processes such as Change Management, Service Request and Incident Management. Working within an ITIL structure and having a correspondingly high level of process maturity helps an organisation align with Azure processes and improve outcomes.

Even simple steps such as logging incidents, their timing, what they affected and so on enable operations people to engage more effectively with Azure support teams if required to manage a technical issue.

Amid all the coding and machine automation inherent to public cloud, Datacom has found first-hand that, with potentially mission-critical business services running in the environment, having a productive working relationship with service provider support teams – as well as having the mature, robust processes described above in place – makes a major difference if an issue arises.

“With public cloud, engineers can’t put their hands on physical servers anymore, so if their organisation has gone into Azure in a big way, operations people need to work closely with the cloud provider,” says Roger Sinel, Operations Manager at Datacom. “The pace and dynamic nature of activity in this environment, and the need for ongoing optimal performance, mean you need to work together in harmony. You must align with their processes, and make sure your own are best practice. There can be a lot at stake, which needs careful, close management – in the Zespri case, around the clock and on a global scale.”

6. Maintain maturity,control and governance



Business services, even something as simple as email, are built from and rely on a number of components, including applications, firewalls, switches, servers and storage. Mapping these services, the applications and infrastructure that enable them, and the interconnections and dependencies of the various components, are an integral part of planning for Azure adoption and optimisation and managing a hybrid cloud environment.

This is why Datacom recommends monitoring at an availability-of-business-service level. This means having dependency-based monitoring from the business service level down through applications and infrastructure, including Azure. We also recommend automated root-cause analysis to provide information and evidence for problem management processes and liaising with Azure support teams, if required. For this, organisations need to implement robust analysis and troubleshooting tools, as outlined below.

In short, if your Azure servers or services go down you need to know what will be affected, for how long, and what impact that will have on your organisation in order to determine and take necessary steps. Among other things, this means knowing what it takes to keep a high availability (HA) application operational if X or Y shuts down. And things do go down from time to time.

“Azure has planned, routine outages for maintenance purposes, when servers going offline temporarily. Before this happens, organisations need to know how many more stand-in machines are required to maintain each service in the event of an outage, compared to traditional, on-premise IT,” says Roger Sinel.

Broadly speaking, the skills required for such mapping, monitoring and management include knowing how applications work, how infrastructure works and how they work together. Operations engineers need to co-operate with developers and application specialists to ensure applications run smoothly in Azure through the correct use of resiliency and performance techniques, and by testing and monitoring correctly. What is supported in Azure and what isn’t need to be understood – especially in a hybrid environment. As reliance on Azure increases, along with complexity, automating parts of processes as much as possible using scripts becomes increasingly important.

7. Monitor availabilityof business services



With Azure, as with any public cloud, changing capacity has instantaneous cost implications. In a sense, capacity planning amalgamates with financial planning. Business processes and procurement models need to be reviewed and potentially altered to account for this and ensure your organisation is benefitting from the inherent scalability, flexibility and utility nature of the platform. An increase in capacity needs to trigger clear workflows aimed at getting commercial approvals for the greater spend – a challenge for organisations with complicated procurement processes and financial delegation models.

Reducing capacity can, of course, result in infrastructure cost savings, but Datacom has found that some organisations are not well prepared for managing the process of turning off servers that are not in use – especially at the speed of public cloud. It may be that the new mentality of ‘server off doesn’t mean disaster’ has not permeated the operations team. Or it could mean that the focus is more on standing things up in Azure rather than planning properly for switching things off. The latter needs careful consideration to maximise cost efficiencies and account for the host of dependencies that can build up on top of the machines that have been turned on.

Key to planning for and managing this is building and implementing provisioning processes. In the same way as described in the section above, these need to account for the business services enabled by IT and the applications, infrastructure and other components that deliver it. In other words, you must know how you’re using Azure in your organisation, and how this might change over time. For example, an online retailer would prepare for capacity changes during and after peak shopping periods. It also needs to answer questions such as when can you turn things on or off and what happens if you do. Access to Azure and all the services that rely on it needs to be controlled and logged. Without all this, a server turning off may indeed mean disaster.

8. Combine capacityand commercials



Adopting and making the most of Azure may require investment in new tools to complement native tools. In general, Datacom recommends that organisations have a tooling strategy focusing on tools with API-based integration capabilities. This avoids the lock-in that some proprietary tools cause, which constrains customisation, adds complexity and hampers agility. For optimal outcomes in a hybrid cloud environment too, it is better to use API-based tools – large or small – that enable cross-cloud platform integration alongside native Azure tools.

As mentioned above, in the highly automated world of Azure, using start-up and shutdown scripts –based on PowerShell, for instance – should be a goal for operations teams. Alongside this, server health checks are required to ensure performance. Azure provides native tools to help with such tasks, and many more.

“There is a constant stream of Azure tooling becoming available to monitor apps, check environments and gain insights. In addition, there are native tools for other activities, including Business Intelligence and machine learning. Organisations don’t have to spend more money for these tools – they are made available to help businesses optimise their use of Azure,” says Sunny Katira.

Monitoring tools have new challenges with public cloud: not all were built for this environment. For example, more machines are usually required in public cloud compared with on-premise (to account for machines switching off from time to time) to provide the same service. This means that, if monitoring agents are placed on all Azure machines, they may produce too many alerts to handle. And monitoring costs may go up. So monitoring in Azure needs a new approach, and to be tested and fine-tuned over time.

To enable availability-of-business-services monitoring, many Datacom customers currently use a mix of native Azure tools – some of which are available as functions of the Azure Portal – alongside others. This is practical as long as a monitoring policy is in place to make clear what the various tools cover.

Organisations should also assess their approaches to data backup as they adopt Azure. In a hybrid cloud situation, this isn’t a simple task. Although backing up cloud-ready applications may be relatively straightforward in Azure, replicating traditional enterprise backup methodologies in this environment without a dramatic increase in cost is challenging. For backup, as with monitoring, a mixture of traditional and native Azure tools may be the best option – at least in the short term. For example, Datacom has used using solutions such as Asigra Cloud Backup to complement Azure Backup services.

9. Review your tooling strategy



An increasingly important skill required to make the most of Azure is commercial management.

“With public cloud, organisations need to consider the commercial alongside the technological. Important issues here include the terms and conditions of the environment; licencing issues regarding applications you may want to run in Azure; and how to return services, applications and data from Azure back to the business, if required,” says Brett Alexander.

For example, with licencing, it’s important to note that there may be restrictions for applications moving to Azure, and end-user organisations, not Microsoft, are responsible for complying with them. So the issue needs careful attention to avoid potential penalties from vendors. This is, of course, a chance to review your organisation’s licencing position and potentially reduce attendant costs.

For disaster recovery in Azure, Datacom recommends testing to ensure that it works – especially before go-live of mission-critical systems. For example, we might move a customer’s business service or services from the Azure production environment to a secondary site and back again to ensure everything continues to work.

“We did disaster recovery testing for Zespri during the project, running failovers between different Azure datacentres in the US to ensure business could continue regardless,” says Roger Sinel. “Such testing has many benefits, including revealing in advance any issues with the services and related systems, and with the disaster recovery architecture and processes.”To further reduce risk, organisations should also plan for how to recover services back to the business if things don’t work out with Azure.

10. Consider licencingand disaster recovery



Organisations are of course always in a state of transition with their IT – refreshing kit, updating software, rolling out new solutions. But, as shown above, successfully adopting Azure may require profound changes to various parts of an organisation to be made. Nowadays, organisations must also accept and prepare for accelerating change as public cloud services and other technologies evolve. All this is on top of managing a sometimes sprawling and complex hybrid cloud environment.

Datacom can help. Our software and integration teams have extensive experience in application development, refresh and modification for any type of IT environment – public cloud or otherwise – and delivering the project and change management required. Our professional services, IT management and operations teams are adept at helping customers to optimise cloud adoption and ongoing management – whether they outsource the latter to us or keep it in-house. We also help them take advantage of the scale and economies of SaaS and PaaS, alongside IaaS.

Importantly, we take a technology-independent approach to solving our customers’ business problems. Our aim is to find the best solution for them, whatever that may be. So when we assess public cloud providers as part of a potential solution, our approach is both consultative and consistent.

That said, as a Tier-1 Microsoft Cloud Solutions Provider, Datacom has a close relationship with the Azure team, often working in tandem on projects and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with the environment, as the Zespri example shows. Our best-of-class capability, scale, and resource depth make us the first choice for many other organisations to consult, transform, build and manage their IT resources in Azure. We are also at the front line of new innovations in Azure and evolving best practice, as well as changes to pricing, SLAs and other aspects of the platform.

As this paper has shown, we are therefore able to advise customers and help them from an informed, experienced position, and across a wide range of areas related to Azure, including development and operations, designing and building cloud architecture, and integrating and managing complex hybrid cloud and/or multi-cloud environments.

For more information and advice on how your organisation can take full advantage of Azure, please contact us on [email protected] or [email protected].

Reap the rewards

Datacom Group Limited | All content © Datacom 2016 | Available for release on request

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