Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Azure.Source – Volume 80

Spark + AI Summit | Preview | GA | News & updates | Technical content | Azure shows | Events | Customers, partners, and industries

Spark + AI Summit 2019

Spark + AI Summit – Developing for the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge

Last week at Spark + AI Summit 2019, Microsoft announced joining the open source MLflow project as an active contributor. Developers can use the standard MLflow tracking API to track runs and deploy models directly into Azure Machine Learning service. We also announced that managed MLflow is generally available on Azure Databricks and will use Azure Machine Learning to track the full ML lifecycle. The combination of Azure Databricks and Azure Machine Learning makes Azure the best cloud for machine learning. Databricks open sourced Databricks Delta, which Azure Databricks customers get greater reliability, improved performance, and the ability to simplify their data pipelines. Lastly, .NET for Apache Spark is available in preview, which is a free, open-source, .NET Standard compliant, and cross-platform big data analytics framework.

Dear Spark developers: Welcome to Azure Cognitive Services

With only a few lines of code you can start integrating the power of Azure Cognitive Services into your big data workflows on Apache Spark™. The Spark bindings offer high throughput and run anywhere you run Spark. The Cognitive Services on Spark fully integrate with containers for high performance, on premises, or low connectivity scenarios. Finally, we have provided a general framework for working with any web service on Spark. You can start leveraging the Cognitive Services for your project with our open source initiative MMLSpark on Azure Databricks.

Now in preview

Securing Azure SQL Databases with managed identities just got easier

Announcing the second preview release of the Azure Services App Authentication library, version 1.2.0, which release enables simple and seamless authentication to Azure SQL Database for existing .NET applications with no code changes – only configuration changes. Try out the new functionality in existing SQL-backed solutions and gain the security benefits that the App Authentication library and managed identities afford.

Now generally available

Announcing Azure Backup support to move Recovery Services vaults

Announcing general availability support of the move functionality for recovery services vaults, which is an Azure Resource Manager resource to manage your backup and disaster recovery needs natively in the cloud. Migrate a vault between subscriptions and resource groups with a few steps, in minimal downtime and without any data-loss of old backups. Move a Recovery Services vault and retain recovery points of protected virtual machines (VMs) to restore to any point in time later.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse reserved capacity and software plans now generally available

Announcing the general availability of Azure SQL Data Warehouse reserved capacity and software plans for RedHat Enterprise Linux and SUSE. Purchase Reserved Capacity for Azure SQL Data Warehouse and get up to a 65 percent discount over pay-as-you-go rates. Select from 1-year or 3-year pre-commit options. Purchase plans for RedHat Enterprise Linux and save up to 18 percent. Plans are only available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines and the discount does not apply to RedHat Enterprise Linux SAP HANA VMs or RedHat Enterprise Linux SAP Business Apps VMs. Save up to 64 percent on your SUSE software costs. SUSE plans get the auto-fit benefit, so you can scale up or down your SUSE VM sizes and the reservations will continue to apply. In addition, there is a new experience to purchase reservations and software plans, including REST APIs to purchase azure reservation and software plans.

Azure Cost Management now generally available for Pay-As-You-Go customers

Announcing the general availability of Azure Cost Management features for all Pay-As-You-Go and Azure Government customers, which will greatly enhance your ability to analyze and proactively manage your cloud costs. These features enable you to analyze your cost data, configure budgets to drive accountability for cloud costs, and export pre-configured reports on a schedule to support deeper data analysis within your own systems. This release for Pay-As-You-Go customers also provides invoice reconciliation support in the Azure portal via a usage csv download of all charges applicable to your invoices.

News and updates

Microsoft container registry unaffected by the recent Docker Hub data exposure

Docker recently announced Docker Hub had a brief security exposure that enabled unauthorized access to a Docker Hub database, exposing 190k Hub accounts and their associated GitHub tokens for automated builds. While initial information led people to believe the hashes of the accounts could lead to image:tags being updated with vulnerabilities, including official and microsoft/ org images, this was not the case. Microsoft has confirmed that the official Microsoft images hosted in Docker Hub have not been compromised. Regardless of which cloud you use, or if you are working on-premises, importing production images to a private registry is a best practice that puts you in control of the authentication, availability, reliability and performance of image pulls.

AI for Good: Developer challenge

Do you have an idea that could improve and empower the lives of everyone in a more accessible way? Or perhaps you have an idea that would help create a sustainable balance between modern society and the environment? Even if it’s just the kernel of an idea, it’s a concept worth exploring with the AI for Good Idea Challenge. If you’re a developer, a data scientist, a student of AI, or even just passionate about AI and machine learning, we encourage you to take part in the AI for Good: Developer challenge and improve the world by sharing your ideas.

Azure Notification Hubs and Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging Migration

When Google announced its migration from Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) to Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), push services like Azure Notification Hubs had to adjust how we send notifications to Android devices to accommodate the change. If your app uses the GCM library, follow Google’s instructions to upgrade to the FCM library in your app. Our SDK is compatible with either. As long as you’re up to date with our SDK version, you won’t have to update anything in your app on our side.

Governance setting for cache refreshes from Azure Analysis Services

Data visualization and consumption tools over Azure Analysis Services (Azure AS) sometimes store data caches to enhance report interactivity for users. The Power BI service, for example, caches dashboard tile data and report data for initial load for Live Connect reports. This post introduces the new governance setting called ClientCacheRefreshPolicy to disable automatic cache refreshes.

Azure Updates

Learn about important Azure product updates, roadmap, and announcements. Subscribe to notifications to stay informed.

Technical content

Best practices in migrating SAP applications to Azure – part 1

This post touches upon the principles outlined in, Pillars of a great Azure architecture, as they pertain to building your SAP on Azure architecture in readiness for your migration.

Best practices in migrating SAP applications to Azure – part 2

Part 2 covers a common scenario where SAP customers can experience the speed and agility of the Azure platform is the ability to migrate from a SAP Business Suite running on-premises to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud.

Use Artificial Intelligence to Suggest 1-5 Star Ratings

When customers are impressed or dissatisfied about a product, they come back to where it was purchased looking for a way to leave feedback. See how to use artificial intelligence (Cognitive Service) to suggest star ratings based on sentiment – detected as customers write positive or negative words in their product reviews. Learn about CogS, Sentiment Analysis, and Azure Functions through a full tutorial – as well as where to go to learn more and setup a database to store and manage submissions.

You should never ever run directly against Node in production. Maybe.

Running against Node might cause your app to crash. To prevent this, you can run Node with a monitoring tool, or you can monitor your applications themselves.

Configure Azure Site Recovery from Windows Admin Center

Learn how to use Windows Admin Center to configure Azure Site Recovery to be able to replicate virtual machines to Azure, which you can use for protection and Disaster Recovery, or even migration.

Connecting Twitter and Twilio with Logic Apps to solve a parking problem

See how Tim Heuer refactored a solution to a common problem NYC residents face—trying to figure out street-side parking rules— using Azure Logic Apps and provided connectors for Twitter and Twilio to accomplish the same thing.

Creating an Image Recognition Solution with Azure IoT Edge and Azure Cognitive Services

Dave Glover demonstrates how one can use Azure Custom Vision and Azure IoT Edge to build a self-service checkout experience for visually impaired people—all without not needing to be a data scientist. The solution is extended with Python Azure Function, SignalR and Static Website Single Page App.

Get Azure Pipeline Build Status with the Azure CLI

For those who prefer the command line, it's possible to interact with Azure DevOps using the Azure CLI. Neil Peterson takes a quick look at the configuration and basic functionality of the CLI extension as related to Azure Pipelines.

dotnet-azure : A .NET Core global tool to deploy an application to Azure in one command

The options for pushing your .NET Core application to the cloud are not lacking depending on what IDE or editor you have in front of you. But what if you just wanted to deploy your application to Azure with a single command? Shayne Boyer shows you how to do just that with the dotnet-azure global tool.

Detecting threats targeting containers with Azure Security Center

More and more services are moving to the cloud and they bring their security challenges with them. In this blog post, we will focus on the security concerns of container environments. This post goes over several security concerns in containerized environments, from the Docker level to the Kubernetes cluster level, and shows how Azure Security Center can help you detect and mitigate threats in the environment as they’re occurring in real time.

Customize your Azure best practice recommendations in Azure Advisor

Cloud optimization is critical to ensuring you get the most out of your Azure investment, especially in complex environments with many Azure subscriptions and resource groups. Learn how Azure Advisor helps you optimize your Azure resources for high availability, security, performance, and cost by providing free, personalized recommendations based on your Azure usage and configurations.

5 tips to get more out of Azure Stream Analytics Visual Studio Tools

Azure Stream Analytics is an on-demand real-time analytics service to power intelligent action. Azure Stream Analytics tools for Visual Studio make it easier for you to develop, manage, and test Stream Analytics jobs. This post introduces capabilities and features to help you improve productivity that were included in two major updates from earlier this year: test partial scripts locally; share inputs, outputs, and functions across multiple scripts; duplicate a job to other regions; local input schema auto-completion; and testing queries against SQL database as reference data.

Azure Tips and Tricks – Become more productive with Azure

Since inception in 2017, the Azure Tips & Tricks collection has grown to over 200+ tips as well as videos, conference talks, and several eBooks spanning the entire breadth of the Azure platform. Featuring a new weekly tip and video it is designed to help you boost your productivity with Azure, and all tips are based off of practical real-world scenarios. This post re-introduces a web resource called Azure Tips and Tricks that helps existing developers using Azure learn something new within a couple of minutes.

Optimize performance using Azure Database for PostgreSQL Recommendations

You no longer have to be a database expert to optimize your database. Make your job easier and start taking advantage of Azure Database for PostgreSQL Recommendation for Microsoft Azure Database for PostgreSQL today. By analyzing the workloads on your server, the recommendations feature gives you daily insights about the Azure Database for PostgreSQL resources that you can optimize for performance. These recommendations are tightly integrated with Azure Advisor to provide you with best practices directly within the Azure portal.

Azure shows

Episode 275 – Azure Foundations | The Azure Podcast

Derek Martin, a Technology Solutions Principal (TSP) at Microsoft talks about his approach to ensuring that customers get the foundational elements of Azure in place first before deploying anything else. He discusses why Microsoft is getting more opinionated, as a company, when advocating for best practices.

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Code-free modern data warehouse using Azure SQL DW and Data Factory | Azure Friday

Gaurav Malhotra joins Scott Hanselman to show how to build a modern data warehouse solution from ingress of structured, unstructured, semi-structured data to code-free data transformation at scale and finally to extracting business insights into your Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Serverless automation using PowerShell in Azure Functions | Azure Friday

Eamon O'Reilly joins Scott Hanselman to show how PowerShell in Azure Functions makes it possible for you to automate operational tasks and take advantage of the native Azure integration to deliver and maintain services.

Meet our Azure IoT partners: Accenture | Internet of Things Show

Mukund Ghangurde is part of the Industry x.0 practice at Accenture focused on driving digital transformation and digital reinvention with industry customers. Mukund joined us on the IoT Show to discuss the scenarios he is seeing in the industry where IoT is really transforming businesses and how (and why) Accenture is partnering with Azure IoT to accelerate and scale their IoT solutions.

Doing more with Logic Apps | Block Talk

Integration with smart contracts is a common topic with developers. Whether with apps, data, messaging or services there is a desire to connect the functions and events of smart contracts in an end to end scenario. In this episode, we look at the different types of scenarios and look at the most common use case – how to quickly expose your smart contract functions as microservices with the Ethereum Blockchain Connector for Logic Apps or Flow.

How to get started with Azure API Management | Azure Tips and Tricks

Learn how to get started with Azure API Management, a service that helps protect and manage your APIs.

How to create a load balancer | Azure Portal Series

Learn how to configure load balancers and how to add virtual machines to them in the Azure Portal.

Rockford Lhotka on Software Architecture | The Azure DevOps Podcast

This week, Jeffrey Palermo and Rocky Lhotka are discussing software architecture. They discuss what Rocky is seeing transformation-wise on both the client side and server side, compare and visit the spectrum of Containers vs. virtual machines vs. PaaS vs. Azure Functions, and take a look at microservice architecture. Rocky also gives his tips and recommendations for companies who identify as .NET shops, and whether you should go with Containers or PaaS.

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Episode 8 – Partners Help The Azure World Go Round | AzureABILITY Podcast

Microsoft's vast partner-ecosystem is a big part of the Azure value proposition. Listen in as Microsoft Enterprise Channel Manager Christine Schanne and Louis Berman delve into the partner experience with Neudesic; a top Gold Microsoft Partner.

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Events

Get ready for Global Azure Bootcamp 2019

Global Azure Bootcamp is a free, one-day, local event that takes place globally. This annual event, which is run by the Azure community, took place this past Saturday, April 27, 2019. Each year, thousands attend these free events to expand their knowledge about Azure using a variety of formats as chosen by each location. Did you attend?

Connecting Global Azure Bootcampers with a cosmic chat app

We added a little “cosmic touch” to the Global Azure Bootcamp this past weekend by enabling attendees to greet each other with a chat app powered by Azure Cosmos DB. For a chat app, this means low latency in the ingestion and delivery of messages. To achieve that, we deployed our web chat over several Azure regions worldwide and let Azure Traffic Manager route users’ requests to the nearest region where our Cosmos database was deployed to bring data close to the compute and the users being served. That was enough to yield near real-time message delivery performance as we let Azure Cosmos DB replicate new messages to each covered region.

Customers, partners, and industries

Connect IIoT data from disparate systems to unlock manufacturing insights

Extracting insights from multiple data sources is a new goal for manufacturers. Industrial IoT (IIoT) data is the starting point for new solutions, with the potential for giving manufacturers a competitive edge. These systems contain vast and vital kinds of information, but they run in silos. This data is rarely correlated and exchanged. To help solve this problem, Altizon created the Datonis Suite, which is a complete industrial IoT solution for manufacturers to leverage their existing data sources.

Migrating SAP applications to Azure: Introduction and our partnership with SAP

Just over 25 years ago, Bill Gates and Hasso Plattner met to form an alliance between Microsoft and SAP that has become one of our industry’s longest lasting alliances. At the time their conversation was focused on how Windows could be the leading operating system for SAP’s SAPGUI desktop client and when released a few years later, how Windows NT could be a server operating system of choice for running SAP R/3. Ninety percent of today’s Fortune 500 customers use Microsoft Azure and an estimated 80 percent of Fortune customers run SAP solutions, so it makes sense why SAP running on Azure is a key joint initiative between Microsoft and SAP. Over the next three weeks leading up to this year’s SAPPHIRENOW conference in Orlando, we’re publishing an SAP on Azure technical blog series (see Parts 1 & 2 in Technical content above).

Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 35

The Azure Marketplace is the premier destination for all your software needs – certified and optimized to run on Azure. Find, try, purchase, and provision applications & services from hundreds of leading software providers. You can also connect with Gold and Silver Microsoft Cloud Competency partners to help your adoption of Azure. In the first half of March, we published 68 new offers.

Azure Government Secret Regions, Azure Batch updates & Service Fabric Mesh new additions | Azure This Week – A Cloud Guru

This time on Azure This Week, Lars covers new Azure Government Secret regions and the new updates to Azure Batch. He also talks about new additions to Service Fabric Mesh. Check it out!

Quelle: Azure

Serverless automation using PowerShell preview in Azure Functions

As companies of all sizes move their assets and workloads to the cloud, there’s a clear need to provide more powerful ways to manage, govern, and automate their cloud resources. Such automation scenarios require custom logic best expressed in PowerShell. They are also typically executed either on a schedule or when an event happens like an alert on an application, a new resource getting created, or when an approval happens in an external system. 

Azure Functions is a perfect match to address such scenarios as it provides an application development model based on triggers and bindings for accelerated development and serverless hosting of applications. PowerShell support in Functions has been a common request from customers, given its event-based capabilities.

Today, we are pleased to announce that we have brought the benefits of this model to automating operational tasks across Azure and on-premises systems with the preview release of PowerShell support in Azure Functions.

Companies all over the world have been using PowerShell to automate their cloud resources in their organization, as well as on-premises, for years. Most of these scenarios are based on events that happen on the infrastructure or application that must be immediately acted upon in order to meet service level agreements and time to recovery.

With the release of PowerShell support in Azure Functions, it is now possible to automate these operational tasks and take advantage of the native Azure integration to modernize the delivering and maintenance of services.

PowerShell support in Azure Functions is built on the 2.x runtime and uses PowerShell Core 6 so your automation can be developed on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It also integrates natively with Azure Application Insights to give full visibility into each function execution. Previously, Azure Functions had experimental PowerShell support in 1.x., and it is highly recommended that customers move their 1.x PowerShell functions to the latest runtime.

PowerShell in Azure Functions has all the benefits of other languages including:

Native bindings to respond to Azure monitoring alerts, resource changes through Event Grid, HTTP or Timer triggers, and more.
Portal and Visual Studio Code integration for authoring and testing of the scripts.
Integrated security to protect HTTP triggered functions.
Support for hybrid connections and VNet to help manage hybrid environments.
Run in an isolated local environment.

Additionally, functions written with PowerShell have the following capabilities to make it easier to manage Azure resources through automation.

Automatic management of Azure modules

Azure modules are natively available for your scripts so you can manage services available in Azure without having to include these modules with each function created. Critical and security updates in these Az modules will be automatically upgraded by the service when new minor versions are released.

You can enable this feature through the host.json file by setting “Enabled” to true for managedDependency and updating Requirements.psd1 to include Az. These are automatically set when you create a new function app using PowerShell.

host.json
{
    “version”: “2.0”,
    “managedDependency”: {
       “Enabled”: “true”
    }
}

Requirements.psd1
@{
    Az = ‘1.*’
}

Authenticating against Azure services

When enabling a managed identity for the function app, the PowerShell host can automatically authenticate using this identity, giving functions permission to take actions on services that the managed identity has been granted access. The profile.ps1 is processed when a function app is started and enables common commands to be executed. By default, if managed identify is enabled, the function application will authenticate with Connect-AzAccount -Identity.

Common automation scenarios in Azure

PowerShell is a great language for automating tasks, and with the availability in Azure Functions, customers can now seamless author event-based actions across all services and applications running in Azure. Below are some common scenarios:

Integration with Azure Monitor to process alerts generated by Azure services.
React to Azure events captured by Event Grid and apply operational requirements on resources.
Leverage Logic Apps to connect to external systems like IT service management, DevOps, or monitoring systems while processing the payload with a PowerShell function.
Perform scheduled operational tasks on virtual machines, SQL Server, Web Apps, and other Azure resources.

Next steps

PowerShell support in Azure Functions is available in preview today, check out the following resources and start trying it out:

Learn more about using PowerShell in Azure Functions in the documentation, including quick starts and common samples to help get started.
Sign up for an Azure free account if you don’t have one yet, and build your first function using PowerShell.
You can reach the Azure Functions team on Twitter and on GitHub. For specific feedback on the PowerShell language, please review its Azure Functions GitHub repository.
We also actively monitor StackOverflow and UserVoice, so feel free to ask questions or leave your suggestions. We look forward to hearing from you!
Learn more about automation and PowerShell in Functions on Azure Friday and Microsoft Mechanics.

Quelle: Azure

Azure Tips and Tricks – Become more productive with Azure

Today, we’re pleased to re-introduce a web resource called “Azure Tips and Tricks” that helps existing developers using Azure learn something new within a couple of minutes. Since inception in 2017, the collection has grown to over 200+ tips as well as videos, conference talks, and several eBooks spanning the entire universe of the Azure platform. Featuring a new weekly tip and video it is designed to help you boost your productivity with Azure, and all tips are based off of practical real-world scenarios. The series spans the entire universe of the Azure platform from App Services, to containers, and more!

 

Figure 1: The Azure Tips and Tricks homepage.

 

With the new site, we’ve included the much-needed ability to navigate between Azure services, so that you can quickly browse your favorite categories.

 

Figure 2: The new Azure Tips and Tricks navigation capabilities.

 

There is search functionality to assist you to quickly find what you are looking for.

 

 

Figure 3: The new Azure Tips and Tricks search function.

 

The site is also open-source on GitHub, so anyone can help contribute to the site, ask questions, and jump-in wherever they want! While you are on the page go ahead and star us to keep up to date.

 

Figure 4: The Azure Tips and Tricks GitHub repo.

 

What are you waiting for? Visit the site and star the repo so that you don’t miss future updates to the site, and to ensure you make the most of the Azure platform’s constantly evolving services and features. I’ll also be presenting a session on the series at Microsoft Build on Monday, May 6th from 2:30-2:50pm. I hope to meet you in person.

Thanks for reading and keep in mind that you can learn more about Azure by following our official blog and Twitter account. You can also reach the author of this post on Twitter.
Quelle: Azure

Connecting Global Azure Bootcampers with a cosmic chat app

Every year on the same day, the Global Azure Bootcamp brings together cloud enthusiasts who are eager to learn about Microsoft Azure. This year, the Bootcamp will be held on April 27, 2019 in more than 300 locations worldwide where local communities will welcome developers and IT professionals for a day of workshops, labs, and talks.

It will be a great experience for tens of thousands of Azure Bootcampers all around the world to simultaneously participate in this event. We decided to add a little “cosmic touch” to the Bootcamp by letting the attendees greet each other with a chat app that’s powered by Azure Cosmos DB. The chat app will be made available on April 27, 2019 by following a link displayed in each Bootcamp location!

A global database for a global event

If you think about it, this marriage just makes sense. It’s a planet-scale bootcamp, and what better technology than a globally distributed database to serve a global event?

From the beginning, we tackled this project with the goal of a great user experience. For a chat app, this means low latency in the ingestion and delivery of messages. To achieve that, we deployed our web chat over several Azure regions worldwide and let Azure Traffic Manager route users’ requests to the nearest region where our Cosmos database was deployed to bring data close to the compute and the users being served. That was enough to yield near real-time message delivery performance as we let Azure Cosmos DB replicate new messages to each covered region.

To minimize ingestion latency, we also configured our Cosmos database to be deployed in multi-master mode, which makes it possible to write data to any region the database is deployed to.

The Azure Cosmos DB change feed as a publication system

You expect a chat app to display new messages in real-time, so these messages have to be pushed to the clients without the need for a slow and costly polling mechanism. We used Azure Cosmos DB’s change feed to subscribe to new messages being received and delivered them to each client through the Azure SignalR service.

We also chose to consume the change feed locally in each region to further minimize delivery latency, as having a single point of dispatch would have effectively reduced the benefits we got from being globally distributed and multi-mastered.

Here’s a high-level diagram showing the Azure services in play and how they interact:

Planet-scale, batteries included

So, what does it take to build such a distributed app? Nothing much really, as Azure Cosmos DB takes care of all the rocket science required! Since all the complexity involved with global data distribution is effectively hidden from the developer, what’s left are simple concepts that are easy to reason about:

You write messages to the region that’s closest to you.
You receive messages through the change feed, whatever region they were written from.

These concepts are straightforward to implement, and it only took around a day of development time to have the chat app up and running.

Keeping it friendly with automatic moderation

As our chat app was about to be made available for anyone to use, we also had to make sure to filter out any inappropriate message that may spoil the friendly spirit of the Global Azure Bootcamp. To achieve that, we used the content validation service powering the Content Moderator APIs from Azure Cognitive Services to scan each incoming message. This turnkey solution allows us to detect potential profanity or presence of personally identifiable information, and instantly block the related messages to ensure a positive and safe experience for everyone.

The database for real-time, global workloads

By ensuring the lowest latency in both the ingestion and delivery of messages, the combination of Azure Cosmos DB’s global footprint, multi-master capability, and change feed API let us achieve the best experience for anyone using the chat app, wherever they are on the planet.

Want to find out how Azure Cosmos DB’s unique characteristics can help you solve your next data challenges?

Head over to the Azure Cosmos DB website and learn more about the service.
Follow us on Twitter @AzureCosmosDB.
Ask your questions on StackOverflow with the tag [azure-cosmosdb].
Get started today using Azure Cosmos DB’s local emulator or try the service!

Quelle: Azure

Best practices in migrating SAP applications to Azure – part 2

This is the second blog in a three-part blog post series on best practices in migrating SAP to Azure.

Journey to SAP S/4HANA from SAP Business Suite

A common scenario where SAP customers can experience the speed and agility of the Azure platform is the ability to migrate from a SAP Business Suite running on-premises to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud. This scenario is a two-step process. The first step being migration from enterprise resource planning (ERP) on-premises to the Suite on HANA in Azure, and then converting from Suite on HANA to S/4HANA.

Using the cloud as the destination for such a migration project has the potential to save organizations millions of dollars in upfront cost for infrastructure equipment, and can shave roughly around 12 to 16 weeks off the project schedule as the most complex components of the infrastructure are already in place and can easily be provisioned when required. You can see where these time savings come from by looking at the time it takes to go through the request for proposal (RFP) process, to procure expensive servers with large memories, or potentially to procure dedicated appliances with only a five year lifespans such as storage arrays, network switches, backup appliances, and other data center enhancements. Not to mention the time and cost associated with an expertly trained team that can deploy S4/HANA based on tailored data center integration (TDI) standards as required by SAP. These are the same obstacles the consulting firm Alegri was running into during their experience migrating to S/4HANA on Azure. To read more about their experience, refer to Alegri's customer story, “Modern corporate management without any burden.”

While planning for a migration, you want to have a solid project plan that has all the tasks, milestones, dependencies, and stakeholders identified. You will also want a defined governance model and a RACI chart showing which group owns which tasks. Projects of this size have so many moving parts and dependencies between multiple internal and external teams. Disciple in governance is a must.

When getting started with the actual execution, you would typically want to identify all the SAP prerequisites specific to the versions that are currently in use. Larger SAP migration projects will typically have a number of parallel efforts going on at the same time. You want to be sure the infrastructure design on Azure is fully compliant with SAP’s support matrix. To do so, start by reviewing the SAP documentation and deployment guides on Azure,  Azure's SAP deployment checklist, and the product availability matrix (PAM). This is a great starting point because while you’re working on the initial landscape design, the basis admins can start running the readiness check looking at impact of the legacy custom code in the SAP Business Suite system, the S/4HANA sizing, and other S/4 perquisites required before the upgrade can begin. Together you’ll group on any new items that were uncovered before finalizing the design.

Next is the infrastructure deployment on Azure. The initial deployment is minimal, just enough infrastructure to support the initial sandbox and development tiers. Requirements at this state include:

An Azure subscription
An established VPN connection or Express Route
A deployed Azure network (VNets and Subnets) and security configurations (Network Security Groups)
The required number of virtual or bare metal servers and associated storage

The above requirements will comprise the new target environment. It is important to note that an ExpressRoute will be required to provide enough bandwidth for migrating medium to large databases. The basis admins can start installing the Suite on HANA database and the initial application servers. This will give the broader project team all the working area they need to run through as many migration runs as necessary to iron out any issues.

We get a lot of questions around the best migration method to use when migrating SAP from on-premises to Azure, which is understandable given the number of options including backup/restore, export/import, SUM and DMO, and more. When migrating the SAP Business Suite to S/4HANA on Azure, it’s easier to use the SUM and DMO option from SAP to handle the database migration and installing new application servers in Azure. This also provides an opportunity to have the new landscape in Azure on the latest supported operating system versions for optimal capabilities, performance, and support. My fellow Azure colleague Kiran Musunuru just recently authored a white paper on “Migration Methodologies for SAP on Azure” that outlines using the SUM and DMO option to migrate SAP Business Suite to S/4HANA as well as tools, options, individual steps, and the overall process of the migration.

Here are some tips that I’ve learned through my migration experience to help you avoid any last minute surprises.

Check the minimum required SAP versions and release levels across the landscape.
Check the PAM for Java components to see if they are required for your S/4HANA deployment.
Use the benchmark tool in DMO to get realistic migration times for the system. This helps with determining the best ExpressRoute sizing for the migration, and sets expectations for required downtimes.
Know the Unicode requirement to upgrade to S/4HANA.
Know the dual stack systems remediation.
Know that OS flavor and versions might differ from existing internal IT standards.
Plan for the Fiori deployment.
Be prepared to perform multiple migration mock runs for complex or very large landscapes.

Once the migration from the on-premises system to the Azure environment is complete, the conversion from the SAP Business Suite on HANA to S/4HANA can begin. Before starting I would review SAP’s conversion guide for the S/4HANA version that you will be upgrading to. For example, here is the conversion guide for S/4HANA 1809.

Deploying a new S/4HANA landscape can all be done in Azure by the basis team and eliminates any dependencies on the many internal IT teams that would be required with a deployment in a traditional on-premises environment. Most customers will likely start with a simple sandbox or new development system from a system copy of the newly migrated suite on the HANA system. This provides a staging area to run through all the simplification checks, custom code migrations, and actual S/4 conversion mock runs. In parallel, the basis team can start deploying the QAS and production tiers including the new VM’s and configuration for Fiori. Once the necessary checks and conversion have been completed, the process is simply repeated for QAS and production.

This blog post is meant as a general overview of the process and I didn’t touch on any of the functional areas as I wanted to focus on the items that are connected to the Azure platform. We also have a number of scripting and automation options around deploying S/4HANA landscapes on Azure. For an overview you can visit the blog post, “Automating SAP deployments in Microsoft Azure using Terraform and Ansible” written by Tobias Niekamp from the Azure Compute engineering team.

Next week, my colleague Troy Shane will cover the migration of SAP BW/4HANA. It will also cover how best to deploy SAP BW/4HANA in a scale-out architecture today and in the near future when our new Azure NetApp Files becomes generally available for SAP HANA workloads.
Quelle: Azure