Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Prioritize datacenter discovery and readiness assessments to accelerate cloud migration

Cloud migrations are an effective way to drive operational efficiencies and to flip capital expenses to operational. Successful cloud migrations are rooted in bias towards action and execute with urgency towards triggers that need immediate attention. In our experience, migration projects that start with a deep understanding of the IT landscape, are best positioned to mitigate any complexities. In our experience, leaders who set actionable project goals and timelines, bring together teams and encourage solution thinking, and lean in to track progress towards well-defined objectives, are the most effective in helping their organizations realize cloud migration targets.

In the kick-off blog of this series, we listed prioritizing assessments as one of our top three recommendations to accelerate your cloud migration journey. Comprehensive cloud migration assessments should cover the entire fleet and help you arrive at key decisions related to candidate apps, optimum resource allocation, and cost projections. You’ll want to understand your applications, their on-premises performance, uncover dependencies and interrelated systems, and estimate cloud readiness and run-cost. This analysis is critical to fully recognize what you are working with and proactively understand how to best manage these resources in the cloud. Further, in our experience with customers, inadequately planned migrations—especially those that don’t focus on optimizing infrastructure resources and cost levers such as compute, storage, licensing, and benefits including Azure Hybrid Benefit and Software Assurance—often result in long-term sticker shock.

Prioritizing assessments is also important to keep your IT and financial organizations aligned around how to transform your business with Azure while keeping the cost structure lean to weather changing market conditions. We shared our guidance in this cloud migration blog to help you understand the financial considerations for cloud migrations and best practice guidance for managing cloud costs.

Comprehensive discovery with Azure Migrate and Movere

The discovery process can be slow and daunting, especially for enterprises that host hundreds of applications and resources across multiple datacenters. Arriving at an accurate baseline of your IT infrastructure is tedious and often requires you to connect disparate sets of information across various tools, sub-systems, and business teams. Leverage Azure Migrate or Movere to automate this process and quickly perform discovery and assessments of your on-premises infrastructure, databases, and applications. Movere is available via the United States and Worldwide Solutions Assessment program. Azure Migrate is available with your Azure subscription at no additional cost.

Azure Migrate discovery and assessment capabilities are agentless and offer the following key features:

Comprehensive, at-scale discovery features for Linux and Windows servers, running on hypervisor platforms such as VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V, public clouds such as AWS or GCP, or bare metal servers.
Discovery of infrastructure configuration and actual resource utilization in terms of cores, memory, disks, IOPS, and more so that you can right-size and optimize your infrastructure based on what you actually need to meet the desired application performance in Azure. Discovery of IOPS characteristics over a period of time results in an accurate prediction of resources that your applications need in the cloud.
Azure assessment reports that help you understand the various offers, SKUs, and offerings and associated cost of running your applications in Azure. You can customize for different scenarios and compare results to make decisions related to target regions, EA pricing, reserved instances, SKU consolidation, and more.
Features that help you inventory your applications and software components installed on your servers – this capability is crucial in understanding your application vendor estate and evaluating compatibility, end-of-support, and more.
Agentless dependency mapping so that you can visualize dependencies across different tiers of an application or across applications – this feature helps you design high-confidence migration waves and to mitigate any complexities upfront.

CMDBs, ITAM, and management tools enrich discovery data

Discovery and assessment results are important, but intersecting them with your existing on-premises data sources unlocks powerful insights, driving better decision-making. These are data sources that are great to get started with – your Configuration Management Database (CMDB), IT asset management systems (ITAM), Active Directory, management tools, and monitoring systems. Merging your rich IT data repositories with discovery and assessment reports broadens understanding across different dimensions and renders a more complete and accurate view of your business units, IT assets, and business applications.

Use Azure cost estimations from the assessment output and allocate the projections to various business teams to better recognize their future budgetary requirements. Compare Azure cost against the current spend to estimate potential cloud savings your teams can accrue by moving to Azure.
Identify machines that have reached their OS end-of-support and reference your CMDB to identify associated application owners and teams to prioritize migrations to Azure.
Filter out machines with high CPU and memory utilization, and correlate with performance events in your monitoring systems to identify applications with capacity constraints. These applications are ideal candidates that can benefit from Azure’s auto-scaling, and VM scale sets capabilities.
Identify related systems using the Azure Migrate dependency mapping feature, and map associated owners from your CMDBs and Azure AD to identify move group owners.
Identify servers with zero to low usage and work with owning business units on decommissioning options.
Understand the recommend migration window by mapping RTO/RPO information from your private data sources.
Understand your storage IOPS and projected application growth to select the appropriate Azure storage and disk SKUs.

These are just a few samples of the many insights that can be surfaced by unifying discovery and assessment results with IT data sources.

Data-driven progress tracking

CIOs and leaders who are on point for driving cloud migration initiatives should periodically track progress, identify and communicate migration priorities, and bring together stakeholders to ensure that teams on the ground are making progress. Dashboards that track progress on the projects and the quality of insights and actions being generated are effective tools to stay focused.

Some important dimensions that dashboards should include are datacenter cost trends, fleet size in terms of physical hosts, count of virtual servers, provisioned storage, OS distribution, VM density by host, resource utilization in terms of cores, memory, and storage. Additionally, views should help quickly identify important cloud migration triggers such as hardware that is coming up for refresh, OS versions that are hitting end-of-support, business units that are constrained by capacity.

Here is a sample PowerBI dashboard that an Azure customer is using to track the progress of their cloud assessment and migration project:

 
  

Next steps

Investigate the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure to align your cloud migration priorities and objectives before you start planning and ensure a more successful migration.
Make sure you start your journey right by understanding how to build your migration plan with Azure Migrate and reviewing the best practices for creating assessments.
For expert assistance from Microsoft or our qualified partners, check out our Cloud Solution Assessment offerings or join the Azure Migration Program (AMP).
To learn more and to get started, visit the Azure Migration Center.

Coming up next, we’ll explore a big topic that’s key to succeeding in your migrations: anticipating and mitigating complexities. We’ll talk about the organizational challenges and decisions you’ll need to make as you start planning and executing your cloud migrations.

Share your feedback

Please share your experiences or thoughts as this series comes together in the comments below—we appreciate your feedback.
Quelle: Azure

Announcing preview of Java Message Service 2.0 over AMQP on Azure Service Bus

Azure Service Bus simplifies enterprise messaging scenarios by leveraging familiar queue and topic subscription semantics over the industry-driven AMQP protocol. It offers customers a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) offering with deep integrations with Azure services to provide a messaging broker with high throughput, reliable latency while ensuring high availability, secure design, and scalability as a first-class experience. We aim to offer Azure Service Bus for customer workloads on most application stacks and ecosystems.

In keeping with that vision, we’re excited to announce preview support for Java Message Service (JMS) 2.0 over AMQP in Azure Service Bus Premium tier. With this, we empower customers to seamlessly lift and shift their Java and Spring workloads to Azure while also helping them modernize their application stack with best in class enterprise messaging in the cloud.

As enterprise customers look to lift and shift their workloads to Azure, they may take the opportunity to modernize their application stack by leveraging cloud-native Azure offerings. This is more appropriate for components on the data plane, storing or moving data, which benefit from moving away from an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) hosted setup to a more cloud-native PaaS setup.

With databases and data stores, the establishment of standardized APIs and protocols has paved the way for seamless migration, wherein the application is agnostic of the actual provider or implementation of this standardized API and with negligible or configuration only code changes, the applications can move from their current on-premises provider to Azure’s fully managed PaaS offering with expected behavior.

The enterprise messaging ecosystem has been largely fragmented compared to the data ecosystem until the recent AMQP 1.0 protocol standardization in 2011 that drove consistent behavior across all enterprise message brokers guaranteed by the protocol implementation. However, this still did not lead to a standardized API contract, perpetuating the fragmentation in the enterprise messaging space.

The Java Enterprise community (and by extension, Spring) has made some forward strides with the Java Message Service (JMS 1.1 and 2.0) specification to standardize the API utilized by producer and consumer applications when interacting with an enterprise messaging broker. The Apache QPID community furthered this by its implementation of the JMS API specification over AMQP. QPID-JMS, whether standalone or as part of the Spring JMS package, is the de-facto JMS implementation for most enterprise customers working with a variety of message brokers.

Connect existing applications with Azure Service Bus over AMQP

With the feature list supported with this preview (with full parity planned by general availability), Azure Service Bus supports all Java Message Service API contracts, enabling customers to bring their existing applications to Azure without rewriting the application. Here is a list of JMS features that are supported today:

Queues.
Topics.
Temporary queues.
Temporary topics.
Subscriptions.

Shared durable subscriptions.
Shared non-durable subscriptions.
Unshared durable subscriptions.
Unshared non-durable subscriptions.

QueueBrowser.
TopicBrowser.
Auto-creation of all the above entities (if they don’t already exist).
Message selectors.
Sending messages with delivery delay (scheduled messages).

Seamless migration from on-premises or IaaS hosted JMS provider to Azure Service Bus

To connect an existing JMS based application with Azure Service Bus, simply add the Azure Service Bus JMS Maven package or the Azure Service Bus starter for Spring boot to the application’s pom.xml and add the Azure Service Bus connection string to the configuration parameters.

With configuration only code changes, as shown above, customers can keep their business logic agnostic of the message broker and avoid any vendor lock-in.
  

Simple pricing, painless deployments, and scalable resourcing

By leveraging Azure Service Bus JMS support, customers can now avoid the overhead of procuring licenses, managing an enterprise messaging broker on their own IaaS Compute, simplify cost management with a fixed price per messaging unit, and by leveraging automatic scale up and down provisioning to address variability in workloads.

Integrate with other Azure offerings to further modernize your application stack

You can also leverage Azure Service Bus’s integration with other Azure offerings to modernize and simplify the application stack. Here are some ways on how you can do that.

Azure Logic Apps: Utilize Azure Logic Apps connectors for Azure Service Bus to replace various critical business workflows with a simple low-code pay-as-you-go Serverless offering.
Azure Functions: Utilize Azure Functions triggers for Azure Service Bus to replace custom applications with a simple pay-as-you-go serverless PaaS offering.
Azure Monitor and Alerts: Utilize Azure monitor and alerts to keep an eye on the Azure Service Bus Namespace, Queue, Topics, and Subscriptions level metrics.
Azure KeyVault: Utilize integration with Azure KeyVault to encrypt the data on the namespace with a customer-managed key.
Virtual Networks and Private endpoints: Secure access to Azure Service Bus using Virtual network service endpoints. Connect with a cloud-hosted service via an address hosted on your private network using Private endpoints.

Get started today

Get started today by provisioning a Service Bus namespace with JMS features and migrating your existing Java and Spring applications from Active MQ to Service Bus.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Cost Management + Billing updates – July 2020

Whether you're a new student, thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you're spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management + Billing comes in.

We're always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Azure Cost Management + Billing can help you better understand where you're accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Drilling into empty fields and untagged resources in cost analysis.
What's new in Cost Management Labs.
New ways to save money with Azure.
New videos and learning opportunities.
Documentation updates.

Let's dig into the details.

 

Drilling into empty fields and untagged resources in cost analysis

Azure Cost Management + Billing includes all usage, purchases, and refunds for your billing account. Seeing every line item in the full usage and charges file allows you to reconcile your bill at the lowest level, but since each record can represent different charge types, which may have different properties, aggregating them within cost analysis can result in groups of empty results. This is when you see groups like "no value," "other purchases," or "untagged". Now you can filter down to these empty values and group by other attributes to drill in and understand your costs.

You can drill into data in cost analysis by either adding an explicit filter using the filter pills at the top or by clicking any grouped segment in the charts. When you add a filter using the filter pills, you'll see a new "No value" option. This accounts for any and all scenarios where that property might be empty. Here are a few examples:

Other subscription resources: Services that aren't deployed to resource groups do not have a resource group name.
Untagged resources: There are 3 categories of costs that don't have tags: Resources that simply don't have tags applied (Untagged), resources with tags that aren't included in usage data (Tags not available), and charges that cannot be tagged at all (Tags not supported).
Purchases: Since purchases aren't associated with an Azure resource, you might see placeholders for Azure or Marketplace purchases. Azure purchases cover Microsoft offers, like reservations and Azure Active Directory. Marketplace purchases cover any third-party offers available from the Azure Marketplace.

After filtering down to "No value," group data by different properties to get a clearer picture of what that represents. As an example, group by publisher type or charge type to identify Marketplace costs or purchases, respectively, when you see meter and service properties are empty.

You can also click a chart segment to drill into these costs. Clicking any of the placeholders will automatically apply the "No value" filter pill for that property.

Use this new filtering capability to drill in to and understand your costs and let us know what you'd like to see next.

 

What's new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what's coming in Azure Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share feedback and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Cost Management Labs:

Show billing menu items on the Cost Management menu – Now available in the portal.
See all Cost Management + Billing menu items together in one place with quick navigation between scopes.

Of course, that's not all. Every change in Azure Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it's in the full Azure portal. We're eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you'd like to see next. What are you waiting for? Try Cost Management Labs today.

 

New ways to save money with Azure

We're always looking for ways to help you optimize costs. Here's what's new this month:

Save even more on VMs with five-year Hybrid Benefit reservations.
Support for Azure Hybrid Benefit v2 VMs in Japan East.
Reduce your Data Lake storage costs with the new, ultra low-cost Archive tier.
More flexible options with ephemeral OS disks, enabling you to save on storage costs.

 

New videos and learning opportunities

For those visual learners out there, here's one new video you might be interested in:

Azure Cosmos DB: A cost-effective database for cloud native applications (part one) (12 minutes).
Azure Cosmos DB: A cost-effective database for cloud native applications (part two) (11 minutes).
How to optimize costs with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and PostgreSQL (10 minutes).
Cost optimization with Windows containers (6 minutes).

Follow the Azure Cost Management + Billing YouTube channel to stay in the loop with new videos as they're released and let us know what you'd like to see next.

Want a more guided experience? Start with Control Azure spending and manage bills with Azure Cost Management + Billing.

 

Documentation updates

Here are a couple documentation updates you might be interested in:

Noted that early termination fees are not being charged for reservation refunds.
Documented support for budget alert thresholds above 100 percent.

Want to keep an eye on all of the documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management + Billing doc change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request.

 

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don't forget to check out the previous Azure Cost Management + Billing updates. We're always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow @AzureCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. And, as always, share your ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum.

We know these are trying times for everyone. Best wishes from the Azure Cost Management team. Stay safe, and stay healthy!
Quelle: Azure

Eight ways to optimize costs on Azure SQL

Across the globe, businesses are emerging into a new normal, eager to restart or rebuild, but still operating in uncertain times. Optimizing costs and redirecting the spend to where it matters most is as important as ever, and many companies see the cloud as a way to control costs, build resilience, and accelerate time to market.

Customers choose Azure for a variety of reasons, but one of the main reasons is to lower their costs. What more could you do if you could save up to 80 percent or more on your database costs? We introduced the Azure SQL family of database services to help businesses cost-effectively adapt and scale to rapidly changing conditions. Here are the top eight ways you can optimize your data spend, with savings available wherever you are in your digital transformation journey.

1. Maintain business continuity in the cloud with free SQL Server licenses

Use your active Software Assurance benefit to get a free license for every SQL Server in your datacenter for a secondary passive replica you can use for disaster recovery to an Azure Virtual Machine.

2. Shift capex to opex with SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines

Migrating your data to virtual machines hosted on Azure can yield real savings, over $10 million in three years,1 by avoiding the cost and complexity of buying and managing your own physical servers. With SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, Azure manages the infrastructure while you purchase, install, configure, and manage your own software. Benefit even more when you register your VM with Resource Provider and operate more productively with a comprehensive set of manageability features like automated backups, patching, and AlwaysOn availability groups.

3. Protect your data with free security updates

For applications that rely upon SQL Server 2008 or 2008/R2, activate three years of free extended security updates when you migrate to Azure Virtual Machines. Use Azure Site Recovery for easy migration to the cloud with pre-configured SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 images in Azure Gallery.

4. Boost productivity with fully managed Azure SQL database services

Modernize your existing apps on evergreen, fully managed services that are always on the latest version of SQL Server, where backups, high availability, performance tuning, data protection, and more are performed on your behalf. A recent Forrester Consulting study indicated Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance provide up to a 238 percent return on investment in addition to productivity improvements up to 40 percent.2

“We’ve reduced our operating costs by about 70 percent or one-seventh of our previous IT budget. We’re using those savings to focus on research and development to make our product better and faster.” Shoji Ueda: Senior Architect, Benesse Corporation

5. Use your SQL Server licenses for discounted rates on Azure

Save up to 80 percent3 versus other cloud providers with Azure Hybrid Benefit, a unique offer that maximizes the value of your on-premises licenses in the cloud. Unlike the License Mobility benefit on other clouds, Azure Hybrid Benefit covers your Windows Server licenses, too, and eases the migration of heavily virtualized SQL Server workloads by providing four vCores of SQL Database or SQL Managed Instance for every one core of SQL Server Enterprise. On top of this, you get 180-days of dual-use rights so you can maintain your on-premises operation while migrating to Azure.

6. Optimize costs through better insights

Use Azure Advisor to obtain cost savings insights on idle or underutilized VMs. Or, use Azure Cost Management to monitor and control your storage expenses and optimize usage in your SQL databases.

7. Pay only for the resources you use

Pay by the second with the only serverless SQL in the cloud. SQL Database serverless automatically scales, pauses, and resumes compute resources based upon your workload activity, so you only pay for the resources you consume. Icertis, a leading provider of contract lifecycle management in the cloud, cut its database costs by nearly 70 percent with SQL Database serverless.

“Azure SQL Database serverless enables us to offer an even more robust and resilient solution, helping us build deeper partnerships with our customers and go to market stronger than ever before.” Purna Rao, Senior DevOps Architect, Icertis

8. Commit upfront and lock-in rates for up to three years

Reduce your compute costs by up to 72 percent4 versus pay-as-you-go pricing and budget more effectively with reservation pricing. You can save even more, up to 80 percent, when you combine reservation pricing with Azure Hybrid Benefit. Prepay upfront at a reserved price or with convenient monthly payments at no extra cost.

When you factor in the savings from Azure Hybrid Benefit with the performance on Azure, you get an unbeatable value for your mission-critical workloads, costing up to 86 percent less5 than AWS on SQL Database and up to 84 percent less6 for workloads on SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.

Get started with Azure SQL today

Need help with next steps? We can guide you to the right Azure SQL service for your workload and the tools and services to help you cost-effectively migrate to the cloud.

Azure. Invent with Purpose.

1 “The Total Economic ImpactTM of Microsoft Azure IaaS,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting in August 2019 on behalf of Microsoft.

2“The Total Economic ImpactTM of Migration to Azure SQL Managed Databases,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting in March 2020 on behalf of Microsoft.

3 Calculations based on scenarios running 744 hours/month for 12 months at 3-year Reserved Instances or Reserved Capacity. Prices as of 10/24/2018, subject to change. Azure Windows VM calculations based on one D2V3 Azure VM in US West 2 region at the SUSE Linux Enterprise Basic rate. AWS calculations based on one m5.Large VM in US West (Oregon) using Windows Server pay-as-you-go rate for Reserved Instances under Standard 3-year term, all upfront payment. SQL Server calculations based on 8 vCore Azure SQL Database Managed Instance Business Critical in US West 2 running at Azure Hybrid Benefit rate. AWS calculations based on RDS for SQL EE for db.r4.2xlarge on US West (Oregon) in a multi AZ deployment for Reserved Instances under Standard 3-year term, all upfront payment. Extended security updates cost used for AWS is based on Windows Server Standard open NL ERP pricing in USD. Actual savings may vary based on region, instance size, and performance tier. Savings exclude Software Assurance costs, which may vary based on Volume Licensing agreement. Contact your sales representative for details.

4 The 72 percent saving is based on one M32ts Azure VM for Windows OS in US Gov Virginia region running for 36 months at a Pay as You Go rate of ~$3,660.81/month; reduced rate for a 3-year Reserved Instance of ~$663.45/month. Azure pricing as of 10/30/2018 (prices subject to change). Actual savings may vary based on location, instance type, or usage.

5 Price-performance claim based on data from a study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by GigaOm in August 2019. The study compared price performance between a single, 80 vCore, Gen 5 Azure SQL Database on the business-critical service tier and the db.r4.16xlarge offering for SQL Server on AWS RDS. Benchmark data is taken from a GigaOm Analytic Field Test derived from a recognized industry standard, TPC Benchmark™ E (TPC-E), and is based on a mixture of read-only and update intensive transactions that simulate activities found in complex OLTP application environments. Price-performance is calculated by GigaOm as the cost of running the cloud platform continuously for three years divided by transactions per second throughput. Prices are based on publicly available US pricing in East US for Azure SQL Database and US East (Ohio) for AWS RDS as of August 2019. Price-performance results are based upon the configurations detailed in the GigaOm Analytic Field Test. Actual results and prices may vary based on configuration and region.

6 Price-performance claims based on data from a study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by GigaOm in February 2020. The study compared price performance between SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition on Windows Server 2019 Datacenter edition in Azure E32as_v4 instance type with P30 Premium SSD Disks and the SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition on Windows Server 2019 Datacenter edition in AWS EC2 r5a.8xlarge instance type with General Purpose (gp2) volumes. Benchmark data is taken from a GigaOm Analytic Field Test derived from a recognized industry standard, TPC Benchmark™ E (TPC-E). The Field Test does not implement the full TPC-E benchmark and as such is not comparable to any published TPC-E benchmarks. Prices are based on publicly available US pricing in West US for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines and Northern California for AWS EC2 as of January 2020. The pricing incorporates three-year reservations for Azure and AWS compute pricing, and Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server and Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server and License Mobility for SQL Server in AWS, excluding Software Assurance costs. Actual results and prices may vary based on configuration and region.
Quelle: Azure

Creating cloud ready environments with Azure landing zones

Moving to the cloud creates an opportunity to pause and think about how to operate the IT environment. Most organizations in the world have seen their ability to innovate and adopt cloud technologies slowed down by the rules and operating model that governs their existing IT environments. Organizations have their own set of processes, tools, and dedicated staff to ensure that these environments can continuously support business needs.

With the move to a cloud environment, IT has access to new tools and processes that unblock IT operations. By revisiting the operating model, technology-focused teams and Azure partners can help organizations improve agility, cost, and scale.

Azure landing zones in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure are designed to accelerate efforts to map, modernize, or even reimagine the operating model. Azure landing zones help build a cloud environment aligned to the optimal technology operations specific to your needs in the cloud.

As the following analogy illustrates, a standardized foundation can’t fit the variety of needs seen by organizations and operating models. Respecting any need for options and customization, we provide a range of landing zone architectures and implementation options. Organizations can use the implementation option that most clearly aligns to their current cloud strategy. As the approach to managing, operating, and governing the cloud platform matures, you can support your customers and refactor their Azure landing zone implementation to reflect changes to their operating model.

Landing zone analogy

The cloud environment is similar to laying a foundation in any construction project. All architects have to consider common decisions when designing and laying the foundation for any building. They all share things like concrete, rebar, and conduits to bring in necessary utilities, like plumbing or electricity. While foundations contain similar elements and considerations, they may have other considerations that make them unique and wildly different. The foundation for a house is concise and well-contained. The foundation for a stadium is larger and more complex. The foundation for a bridge is even more complex and may require stricter governance and performance standards. Designing the right foundation requires an understanding of what that foundation will support.

The cloud environments, created by Azure landing zones, are very similar as they are all built from the same common design elements. While commonalities exist across all environments, each landing zone implementation is customized to support a specific type of structure or cloud operating model. Like traditional foundations, the cloud environment will require review, modification, and iteration by an experienced architect to ensure that it supports the organization’s long-term needs.

When getting started or rethinking operations, Azure landing zones help accelerate the design, review, and implementation of the cloud environment. When working with your customers to accelerate their journey, Azure landing zones can guide your collaboration, as you validate, customize, and expand Azure landing zones to build the foundation for their digital transformation.

Azure landing zones

Azure landing zones provide a clear architecture, reference implementations, and code samples to create the initial cloud environment. This environment will support all other adoption efforts by consistently applying a set of common design areas. These design areas represent how the operating model is supported in the cloud.

Azure landing zones implementation options provides a reference implementation or approach to help make decisions regarding networking, identity, resource organization, governance, operations, and other design areas that impact the environment. The options provide a structure, which organizations can follow, to ensure all minimal design considerations have been made and decisions are reflected consistently across the cloud environment.

Azure landing zones implementation options

Azure landing zones are designed to meet our customers distinct needs based on today’s requirements, and then provide a clear path to customize and mature any personalized landing zone implementation. This starts with choosing an landing zone implementation option, which will quickly deploy a starting point for the cloud environment.

Some of the Azure landing zones are small by design to encourage skills development and customization. The “start small” implementation options establish an infrastructure-as-code approach and then provide the IT team with a series of decisions guides. This approach helps guide the thoughts and decisions that need to happen. This iterative approach builds the foundation in parallel to the cloud adoption plan to help the team make concrete decisions, as cloud experience matures.

For organizations with well-defined operating models, the “enterprise-scale” implementation option fills in those decisions. This option includes very detailed solutions for security, governance, and operations. These solutions are automated and enforced by Azure Policy and other governance tools in the reference implementations. When starting with enterprise-scale, organizations can reduce the number of decision points and implement a proven cloud operating model faster.

Azure landing zones development

Regardless of the landing zone chosen, the Ready methodology of the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) for Azure helps guide organizations while developing the skills needed to create and support their cloud environment. The theory behind Azure landing zones brings well-established development practices to the infrastructure management function.

As Azure landing zones are implemented and customized, the team will develop skills in general Azure architecture. It is also important to learn how to refactor landing zones to meet new business and technical requirements and how test-driven development can ensure high-quality changes are adding value to the cloud environment. You’ll also experience how the governance tools in Azure can be used to create an environment factory to provide your customers with the rapid deployment of security, well-governed, well-managed azure landing zones.

As your customer’s cloud adoption efforts advance, you can use the guidance found in the Govern and Manage methodologies to further help them mature their governance and operational management postures. As these processes and disciplines mature, Azure landing zones and the suite of Azure governance tools provide a convenient approach to apply changes to existing environments. This allows the collective technology teams to mature governance and management at the right pace, while ensuring that such progress isn’t stalled by technical compatibility challenges.

Learn more

To learn more about Azure landing zones, check out the Ready section under the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) including:

Read Azure landing zones defined.
Review the Azure landing zone design areas and begin thinking about your landing zone requirements.
Evaluate the Azure landing zone implementation options to find the deployment approach that best aligns with your needs.

If you are ready to help your customers deploy Azure landing zones, the following resources will help you get started:

Start small and expand: Deploy the CAF migration landing zone blueprint to start building out a migration ready environment. Add the CAF blueprint to begin adding governance tooling to any environment.
Start with enterprise-scale: For a more robust implementation, deploy the CAF enterprise-scale landing zones leveraging the reference implementation.
Third-party, multi-cloud option: Use CAF Terraform modules to deploy landing zones.

Already have workloads on Azure and want to assess them against best practices? Check out the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework and the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Review.

Grow your business and strengthen your position, as a trusted cloud advisor, by leveraging Azure landing zones to create the right cloud environment to support your customer’s cloud adoption needs! Building on the right environment, ensures that your own and your customers’ modern operations are able to support the innovation and migration needs of the organization. Adopting the cloud on top of Azure landing zones is the first step to unlocking the agility, scale, and cost benefits of the cloud across your customer’s IT portfolio.
Quelle: Azure

Monitoring Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes and servers

Azure Arc is a preview service that enables users to create and attach Kubernetes clusters both inside and outside of Azure. Azure Arc also enables the user to manage Windows and Linux machines outside of Azure the same way native Azure Virtual Machines are managed. To monitor these Azure Arc enabled clusters and servers, you can use Azure Monitor the same way you would use it for the Azure resources.

With Azure Arc, the Kubernetes clusters and servers are given a full-fledged Azure Resource ID and managed identity, enabling various scenarios that simplifies management and monitoring of these resources from a common control plane. For Kubernetes, this enables scenarios such as deploying applications through GitOps-based management, applying Azure policy, or monitoring your containers. For servers, users also benefit from applying Azure policies and collecting logs with Log Analytics agent for virtual machine (VM) monitoring.

Monitoring Azure and on-premises resources with Azure Monitor

As customers begin their transition to the cloud, monitoring on-premises resources alongside their cloud infrastructure can feel disjointed and cumbersome to manage. With Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes and Servers, Azure Monitor can enable you to monitor your full telemetry across your cloud-native and on-premises resources in a single place. This saves the hassle of having to configure and manage multiple different monitoring services and bridges the disconnect that many people experience when working across multiple environments.

For example, the below view shows the Map experience of Azure Monitor on an Azure Arc enabled server, with the dashed red lines showing failed connections. The graphs on the right side of the map show detailed metrics about the selected connection.

Also, here you can see your data from Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), Azure Arc, and Azure Red Hat OpenShift side-by-side in Azure Monitor for containers:

Using Azure Monitor for Azure Arc enabled servers

Azure Monitor for VMs is a complete monitoring offering that gives you views and information about the performance of your virtual machines, as well as dependencies your monitored machines may have. It provides an insights view of a single monitored machine, as well as an at-scale view to look at the performance of multiple machines at once.

Azure Arc enabled servers fit right into the existing monitoring view for Azure Virtual Machines, so the monitoring view on an Azure Arc enabled server will look the same as the view of a native Azure Virtual Machines. From within the Azure Arc blade, you can look at your Azure Arc machines and dive into their monitoring, both through the Performance tab, which shows insights about different metrics such as CPU Utilization and the Map tab, which shows dependencies.

In the at-scale monitoring view, your Azure Arc machines are co-mingled with your native Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Machines Scale Sets to create a single place to view performance information about your machines. The monitoring data shown in these at-scale views will include all VMs, Virtual Machines Scale Sets, and Azure Arc enabled servers that you have onboarded to Azure Monitor.

The Getting Started tab provides an overview of the monitoring status of your machines, broken down by subscription and resource group.

The Performance tab shows trends at scale, as the performance in certain metrics of all the machines in the chosen subscription and resource group. Within the at-scale view, with the provided Type filter, you can drill down any view to show either your native Azure Virtual Machines, native Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets, or your Azure Arc enabled servers.

You can check out our onboarding documentation to learn how to start monitoring your Azure Arc enabled Servers.

Using Azure Monitor for Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes

Azure Monitor for Containers provides numerous monitoring features to create a thorough experience to understand the health and performance for your Azure Arc clusters.

Azure Monitor provides both an at-scale view for all your clusters, ranging from standard AKS, AKS-engine, Azure Red Hat OpenShift, and Azure Arc. Azure Monitor provides important details, such as:

Health statuses (healthy, critical, warning, unknown).
Node count.
Pod count (user and system).

At the resource level for your Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes, there are several key performance indicators for your cluster. Users can toggle the metrics for these charts based on percentile and pin them to their Azure Dashboards.

In the Nodes, Controllers, and Containers tab, data is displayed across various levels of hierarchy with detailed information in the context blade. By clicking on the View in Analytics, you can take a deep dive into the full container logs to analyze and troubleshoot.

Next steps

There are Azure Monitor Workbooks and Grafana integrations available as well if you want to explore additional metrics or create your own custom monitoring experiences.

You can check out our onboarding documentation to learn how to start monitoring your Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters.
Quelle: Azure

Aiming for more than just net zero

Climate experts across the globe agree: if we can’t drastically reduce carbon emissions, our planet will face catastrophic consequences. Microsoft has operated carbon neutral since 2012, and in January 2020 Brad Smith announced our commitment to going carbon negative by 2030. This isn’t a goal we can reach in one easy swoop—it will take time, dedication, and many small steps that coalesce into something greater.

As the cloud business grows, our datacenter footprint grows. In our journey toward carbon negative, Microsoft is taking steps to roll back the effect datacenters have on the environment. Reaching this goal will take many steps, along with the implementation of innovative technologies that have yet to be developed.

Many companies are reaching for net zero emissions, but we’re taking it even further. We’re not just reducing our output to zero. We’re committed to reducing our emissions by half, and then removing the carbon we’ve emitted since 1975, to truly go carbon negative.

The journey to carbon negative

A big part of going carbon negative means completely changing the way datacenters operate. Datacenters have adopted some sustainable methods around cooling, including open-air and adiabatic cooling. These methods have helped to drastically reduce the water and energy consumption of datacenters, but they’re not enough. Currently, datacenters and the backup that powers them in peak load times depend on fossil fuels like diesel. Microsoft is working to change that.

Our ambitious goals to cut down our carbon footprint have necessitated exploration into various technologies. With each kind of technology, we’re determining the best combination to implement based on our overall goal as well as the specific datacenter locations and their local needs.

Liquid immersion cooling

Liquid immersion cooling is predicted to not only help eliminate water consumption but to lower energy consumption, at a minimum, by 5 to 15 percent. As a further benefit, this closed-loop cooling system leads to fewer server racks and smaller datacenter configurations. Datacenters take up a massive amount of space in their current configuration, making this a huge advantage.

Learn more using liquid immersion.

Grid-interactive UPS batteries

Grid-interactive Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) batteries help to balance supply and lower energy demand on the grid by directing microbursts of electricity to datacenters or the grid as needed. These batteries store energy at close to 90 percent efficiency and smooth out intermittency from renewables. As we continue to explore this technology further, we could potentially extend the duration of the batteries from a few minutes to several hours—potentially using these long-duration batteries as a replacement for traditional backup generators.

Learn more about powering sustainability goals.

Clean power backup

Clean power backup has the potential to easily replace conventional diesel with less harmful emissions. Synthetic diesel causes less harm to the environment and provides a much-needed bridge to using renewables. Synthetic diesel can even be used in diesel generators without any modifications, reducing emissions on the way to carbon negative.

Hydrogen fuel cells provide another option for green backup energy to datacenters and are almost two times more efficient than combustion engines. The only output is food-grade steam that is then recaptured and reused.

Learn more about clean power generators.

Learn more about hydrogen innovations.

Power your sustainability goals

These small steps add up to something big. According to a 2018 study, workloads on Azure can be up to 98 percent more carbon-efficient than when running on traditional on-premises datacenters, and we’re making more investments in the future of sustainability. By moving your workloads to Azure, you’re ensuring that your workloads are powered by datacenters with reduced emissions and lowered energy consumption. We’re committed to not only reducing our own carbon footprint but also helping you reduce yours.

Work with us toward a carbon-negative future.

Visit Microsoft Sustainability.
Quelle: Azure