Azure Strategy and Implementation Guide

The essential handbook to cloud transformation with Azure, 4th Edition

Jack Lee, Greg Leonardo, Jason Milgram, Dave Rendón

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781801071642
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Administración de sistemas

Leverage Azure's cloud capabilities to find the most optimized path to meet your firm's cloud infrastructure needs

Key Features

• Get to grips with the core Azure infrastructure technologies and solutions
• Develop the ability to opt for cloud design and architecture that best fits your organization
• Cover the entire spectrum of cloud migration from planning to implementation and best practices

Book Description

Microsoft Azure is a powerful cloud computing platform that offers a multitude of services and capabilities for organizations of any size moving to a cloud strategy.

This fourth edition comes with the latest updates on cloud security fundamentals, hybrid cloud, cloud migration, Microsoft Azure Active Directory, and Windows Virtual Desktop. It encapsulates the entire spectrum of measures involved in Azure deployment that includes understanding Azure fundamentals, choosing a suitable cloud architecture, building on design principles, becoming familiar with Azure DevOps, and learning best practices for optimization and management.

The book begins by introducing you to the Azure cloud platform and demonstrating the substantial scope of digital transformation and innovation that can be achieved with Azure's capabilities. The guide also acquaints you with practical insights into application modernization, Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) deployment, infrastructure management, key application architectures, best practices of Azure DevOps, and Azure automation.

By the end of this book, you will have acquired the skills required to drive Azure operations from the planning and cloud migration stage to cost management and troubleshooting.

What you will learn

• Understand core Azure infrastructure technologies and solutions
• Carry out detailed planning for migrating applications to the cloud with Azure
• Deploy and run Azure infrastructure services
• Define roles and responsibilities in DevOps
• Get a firm grip on Azure security fundamentals
• Carry out cost optimization in Azure

Who this book is for

This book is designed to benefit Azure architects, cloud solution architects, Azure developers, Azure administrators, and anyone who wants to develop expertise in operating and administering the Azure cloud. Basic familiarity with operating systems and databases will help you grasp the concepts covered in this book.

1. Introduction

Today's businesses face significant challenges, from enabling remote work and responding to increased cyberattacks to managing reduced cash flow. Microsoft Azure is a powerful cloud platform designed to help you empower productivity, ensure security, drive efficiency, and save money, enabling you to deliver resiliency, cost savings, and the impact your company requires. Whether you are a start-up or a multinational enterprise operating all over the world, you can start deploying and migrating workloads to Azure with an approach that meets your business needs.

The first step in taking advantage of the many capabilities offered by Azure is careful planning. This book has been created to help you undertake this planning successfully by providing you with a foundational understanding of Azure infrastructure, its core capabilities and benefits, and best practices that will help you successfully use Azure, whether you decide to fully migrate or run a hybrid cloud approach.

This chapter will cover the following:

• What is Microsoft Azure?
• Approaches for Azure adoption
• Azure migration strategies
• Business benefits of Azure infrastructure

This chapter will introduce you to the framework and an overview of the business benefits of Azure. The following chapters will build on that, providing more specific guidance and an explanation of the technologies that will help you plan your migration and Azure infrastructure implementation strategies.

What is Microsoft Azure?

Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform. It provides a variety of services to both individuals and organizations. Cloud computing enables convenient, on-demand access to a shared pool of computing resources over the network. These resources can range from storage and servers to applications that can be deployed rapidly.

Azure provides rapid provisioning of compute resources to help you host your existing applications, streamline new application development, and even enhance on-premises applications. These resources are managed by Microsoft; however, you can monitor them and get reports and alerts when issues arise. This is all built on top of resource pools that can be dynamically assigned to the required services, which can include CPU, memory, storage, and network bandwidth.

There are four categories of service models offered by Azure, which are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Serverless. Azure IaaS is an instant computing infrastructure that offers essential compute, storage, and networking resources on demand and is provisioned and managed over the internet.

It is critical to understand how you can leverage each of these service models to meet your ever-changing demands. When you use Azure, you have a shared responsibility with regard to the resources you deploy. In Figure 1.1, you can see the extent to which you share and manage workload responsibilities with Microsoft for each of the service models, allowing you to focus on resources that are important for your application:

Figure 1.1: Cloud computing models

Depending on the level of responsibilities you'd like to manage compared to what Azure manages, you can determine which cloud service model works best for your organization. Different models afford you different degrees of control over the development environment, the ability to refactor your apps, your time-to-market goals, and so on. Your responsibilities generally increase as you move from SaaS to PaaS to IaaS. The separation of responsibilities will be covered in depth in Chapter 2, Automation and governance in Azure, in the Identity and access control section.

For the remainder of this book, we will be focusing on IaaS. IaaS gives you the most control over the environment as Microsoft provides the foundational infrastructure while you manage the applications. This approach is great for organizations that are looking to customize their cloud solutions for their business applications.

Approaches for Azure adoption

As you consider Azure adoption for your cloud infrastructure strategy, you can choose from different ways to deploy cloud services—public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, multiple clouds, and at the edge of networks. Deciding between these computing environments can depend on a variety of factors.

Let's take a look at each of these approaches.

Public cloud

The most common type of cloud computing service is a public cloud, which is provided by third-party cloud providers and delivered over the public internet. The resources in these public cloud environments are owned and managed by the underlying cloud provider, which in the case of Azure is Microsoft. In public clouds, resources are shared with other organizations or cloud tenants; these can include services such as email, CRM, VMs, and databases.

Some common public cloud use cases involve organizations who want to expose their public workloads, such as public websites or mobile apps. These types of applications have workloads with multiple layers of UI and services in order for them to function. A good example of this is Microsoft's Office products on different platforms, such as desktop, web, and mobile. These offerings are accomplished with the UI being separate from the services, with each implementation using the services and cloud infrastructure behind the scenes to deliver the same experience regardless of the platform.

Azure offers several advantages as a public cloud:

• Azure is built on a vast network of servers and regions, which helps to protect against failures and guarantees high reliability.
• Azure can achieve near-unlimited scalability by providing on-demand services to meet your organization's needs.
• Azure provides both hardware and software at much lower costs compared to on-premises models, as you pay on a consumption basis.

Private cloud

As the name suggests, a private cloud comprises cloud computing resources—hardware and software—used exclusively by one business or organization, with both services and infrastructure being maintained on a private network. A third-party service provider can host a private cloud, or it can be located at an on-site datacenter.

Private clouds are often used by government agencies, financial institutions, or healthcare providers to meet specific regulatory and IT requirements with business-critical operations seeking enhanced control over their environment. On-premises environments can expand to Azure by using Azure ExpressRoute or a site-to-site VPN tunnel to connect workloads while keeping them isolated from public view. We will take a deeper look into these core Azure infrastructure components in Chapter 5, Enabling secure, remote work with Microsoft Azure AD and WVD.

The advantages of choosing a private cloud are:

• Greater control over your resources as they are not shared with others.
• Greater flexibility in customizing the environment to meet specific business needs.
• Better scalability when compared to on-premises infrastructures.

These types of cloud-based solutions are a bit more costly because of the infrastructure needed to isolate and access the organization's workloads.

Hybrid cloud

A hybrid cloud is a computing environment that combines an on-premises datacenter with a public cloud, allowing data and applications to be shared between them. Hybrid clouds allow businesses to seamlessly scale up their on-premises infrastructure into the cloud when processing demand increases and scale back that infrastructure when demand decreases. Hybrid cloud also allows the flexibility to use new cloud-first technologies for new or migrated workloads while keeping other business-critical applications and data on-premises due to migration costs and business or regulatory compliance.

To illustrate, let's think about a tax company scenario. Tax companies generally need large compute only three months out of the year, which can be costly. Rather than investing a large amount of capital in additional on-premises servers to support peak capacity, they can use a hybrid environment in the cloud to expand and contract their compute on demand. This would allow them to keep costs down by only paying for what they use.

Azure offers unique hybrid capabilities that give customers the flexibility to innovate anywhere, whether on-premises, across clouds, or in edge environments. There are different hybrid usage models in Azure that can help you reduce the cost of running your workloads in the cloud. For example, Azure Hybrid Benefit lets you bring your existing on-premises server licenses to Azure to maximize cost savings. This is referred to as the Hybrid licensing model and applies to most server-based licensing.

Microsoft also has unique industry-specific cloud offerings, such as Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, and Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit. These industry clouds marry the whole range of Microsoft's cloud services with industry-specific components and standards, workflows, and APIs to provide tailored solutions to industry challenges, so businesses can target the areas that require technological transformation the most.

Hybrid clouds should not be considered a temporary middle ground that organizations inhabit only while they transition from on-premises to Azure. Instead, a hybrid cloud can be a strategy employed by organizations to find a stable solution that best addresses their information-technology needs.

Multicloud

A multicloud approach involves the use of multiple cloud computing services from more than one cloud provider. This allows you to mix and match services from different providers to get the best combination for a particular task or capitalize on offerings in specific locations, whether they are public or private clouds.

For instance, customers may choose a multicloud strategy to meet regulatory or data sovereignty requirements in different countries. This may also be done to improve business continuity and disaster recovery, for example, backing up on-premises data in two public clouds for business units, subsidiaries, or acquired companies that adopt different cloud platforms.

Multicloud models can become very complex as they require management across multiple platforms. Microsoft Azure provides solutions to help you operate your hybrid cloud seamlessly, which you can read about at https://azure.microsoft.com/solutions/hybrid-cloud-app/. One such solution is Azure Arc, a multicloud management technology. Azure Arc extends Azure management and services with a single control plane across hybrid, multicloud, and edge environments, enabling a consistent state across resource environments and infrastructure. It provides greater visibility of resources, team accountability, and developer empowerment while accelerating innovation from Azure to any location.

Both hybrid cloud and multicloud solutions will be covered in more detail in Chapter 3, Modernizing with hybrid cloud and multicloud.

Edge computing

Edge computing combines the power of the cloud with Internet of Things (IoT) devices. At edge locations, close to where the data resides, you can run virtual machines, data services, and containers using edge computing to gain insights in real time and reduce latency. At the edge of the network, your devices spend less time communicating with the cloud and operate reliably even through extended offline periods.

The wide adoption of smart sensors and connected devices, along with state-of-the-art cloud technologies such as machine learning and AI, means IoT devices are highly responsive to local changes and are contextually aware. There are also security benefits given the distributed nature of edge computing systems, which makes it difficult for a single disruption to compromise the entire network.

This can become beneficial for something like fleet tracking. With the help of Azure, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) devised a fleet management solution using IoT technology and enabled devices to gain new insights. These IoT tracking devices send a significant amount of telemetry data when they are connected to the internet and store this data locally in the absence of a connection. This has allowed the UNDP to move and manage its fleet of vehicles as it coordinates around 12,000 staff members in a mission to eradicate poverty through sustainable development. To find out more, visit https://customers.microsoft.com/story/822486-united-nations-development-programme-nonprofit-azure-iot.

We have seen the different ways you can adopt Azure in your cloud infrastructure strategy, so let's discuss how Azure migration actually works in more detail.

Azure migration strategies

Microsoft Azure gives organizations the ability to push an already existing infrastructure to the cloud, moving either some of their workloads for a hybrid cloud approach, or the entire infrastructure—this is referred to as migration. From migrating legacy applications to deploying applications on Azure, organizations need to determine their requirements beforehand and plan a migration strategy.

Migrating to Azure can be accomplished in several ways based on two important considerations. The first is which type of deployment model you'd like to use: public Azure, private cloud, hybrid Azure, or multicloud. The second is the service category o...