Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (January 2019)

Luper's Learnings - Azure Technical Community for Partners (January 2019)

 

Welcome to the January 2019 monthly edition of Luper's Learnings.

 

Happy New Year! I hope that you had wonderful holidays, rest, vacation and family time (if you celebrate and/or choose to take time off.) It's been many months since I've sent you Luper's Learnings. I feel like with the turn of the year, it's time to recommit to sending this to you on a more regular basis. I didn't try to cram months and months of content in but you'll certainly find plenty to keep you busy 😊.

 

Take a look below and let me know if you find good nuggets, have stuff to add or just want to say "Hi!" It's definitely packed with great learnings.

 

Please do keep in touch via Twitter and email.

 

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Here's what I've learned in the last month…

 

-          Windows Server 2008/R2 and SQL Server 2008/R2 End of Support is coming up fast. SQL Server 2008 end of support occurs just six months from today! This is a key catalyst for customers who are still running applications on-premises on this decade plus old operating system to consider moving those workloads into the cloud. I have spoken with countless partners over the recent months who have brought or are bringing offers to market to help customers first assess their environment to determine what they have in production that will be impacted, second initiate the conversation about the best approach to modernize those applications.

 

These dates are coming up quickly. With the lifecycle dates for Windows Server 2008 staring in May 2008 and various service packs, updates and iterations since then, mainstream support finally came to an end in January 2015 and extended support will be ending one year from now in January 2020.

 

 

 

o   Who cares? According to Azure CVP, Takeshi Numoto's article on this topic posted back in July, one of the biggest reasons that customers need to care is because "End of support means the end of regular security updates. With cyberattacks becoming more sophisticated and frequent, running apps and data on unsupported versions can create significant security and compliance risks." These lack of security updates plus the potential to be out of compliance (whatever regulations any given customer is subject to likely includes ensuring that the OS that their applications run on contains the latest and most up to date security patches.)

o   What options exist? Every customer has at least half a dozen options they can choose from for every application running on either Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 or the combination of the two.

1)      Do nothing – some customers will choose to leave things as they are and take the risk to have unpatched OS and applications and/or be out of compliance. I'm not a fan of this one.

2)      Stay on premises, buy Extended Support  –  for a variety of reasons, some customers want to keep things running as is (software vendor out of business, dude who wrote the application internally 10 years ago not at the company any longer and nobody has source code or any number of other situations.) However, these customers are smart enough to not want to take the risks mentioned above so they may choose to buy the very expensive updates and continue to run on one or both of the 2008 products. "Customers with active Software Assurance or subscription licenses can purchase Extended Security Updates annually for 75 percent of the full license cost of the latest version of SQL Server or Windows Server."

3)      Upgrade – If a customer determines that it's important to have an application continue to run on-premises but recognizes that they need to mitigate the risk of running on a 2008 version of Windows Server and/or SQL Server, they can (hopefully with your help) upgrade to a newer OS, Windows Server 2016 or 2019 and/or SQL Server 2017.

4)      Migrate/Lift and Shift/Rehost – With the help of great partners like you, the fastest and most cost effective short term solution might be to move the existing physical or virtual servers into Azure. Simply put, instead of running that old OS and application on-premises, once moved into Azure, Microsoft will continue to provide Extended Security Updates for free until 2023. "Customers running 2008 or 2008 R2 versions of SQL Server and Windows Server in Azure virtual machines will get Extended Security Updates for free." As I mentioned, this is probably a good option in the short run but, in the end, customers are just kicking the can down the road. No later than 2023, the problem will crop up again. Therefore, now might be a good time to start thinking about the "REs" listed below.

5)      Lastly, if you'll allow me to combine -- we have the "REs". Refactor, Rearchitect and Rebuild. These concepts are not new, you can find articles over the past decade talking about refactoring code, rearchitecting applications etc. Depending on which word you choose and which variation on the definition of that word you like, the actual task can help an application begin its journey down the modernization path including containerization, hybrid or moving to native cloud PaaS services. These are all good options and, as you might imagine, provide better future proofing but will cost more and take longer than Rehosting.

o   I've spent enough time on this topic for now but, it's truly an important topic, should be discussed with all customers still running any flavor of Windows Server 2008 and/or SQL Server 2008 and is a great add-on topic for every cloud related conversation you are having with your customers already. If you need help figuring out how to build and take an assessment & migration offer to market and to your customers, reach out to your local Microsoft team.

o   Resources

§  My colleague Jeff Mitchell and I shared a Blog post and a community call on this topic back in November.

§  Slightly tangential but related, take a look at Julia White's blog post Three reasons why Windows Server and SQL Server customers continue to choose Azure.

§  2008 End of Support Resource Center

§  Support for SQL to Azure SQL DB Managed Instance online migrations using the Azure Database Migration Service

§  I didn't call out cost though you should know that the Azure Hybrid Benefit makes running Windows Server and SQL Server more cost effective than running anywhere else. Mine Tokus talks about the SQL Server angle in hist post Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.

§  Preparing for Windows Server 2008 End of Support eBook

§  Terrific assessment, migration etc. partners (in alphabetical order) like Cloudamize, Docker, Movere, Turbonomic and more.

-          Containers and container orchestration are a thing. Mind you, I'm not too deep in either but I hear more and more customers, partners and colleagues discussing them regularly and feel like there's such a great opportunity to leverage containers in our application modernization efforts.

o   The Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that's available natively in Azure.

o   If you're not taking advantage of it yet, documentation is available including Quickstarts and tutorials plus a five minute introduction.

o   Just a couple of weeks ago, several improvements and fixes were rolled out in AKS.

o   Mark Heath shared Building and Running Container Images with ACR, ACI and the Azure CLI

o   Julien Corioland told us about Secure an Azure Kubernetes cluster with Azure Active Directory and RBAC

-          Azure Monitor

o   While we're on the topic of containers, info on Azure Monitor for Containers agent was recently updated.

o   More broadly, Azure Monitor provides full observability (what a cool word that it) into your applications, infrastructure, and network. This recent Overview should take you less than ten minutes to read and includes a couple short videos.

o   With the retirement in the 2^nd half of 2018 of the  Operations Management Suite brand, the Log Analytics and Application Insights services have been consolidated into Azure Monitor.

o   At the end of November, Shikher Saluja wrote Understanding health criteria in Azure Monitor for VMs

-          If you read my stuff, you've heard me talk about what a fan I am of the Azure Command Line Interface (CLI). While not knocking PowerShell, I tend to lean towards CLI in Cloud Shell, Windows and Linux machines and VMs. I find it interesting to see some of the CLI / PowerShell convergence going on. Madeleine Clayton recently wrote How to migrate from AzureRM to Az in Azure PowerShell since it's a priority for Azure PowerShell to have cross-platform support. The team decided to create a new module rather than make modifications to the existing AzureRM module.

-          You can now replicate and fail over virtual machines deployed in Availability Zones to other regions by using Azure Site Recovery as announced in Sujay Talasila's post Disaster recovery of zone pinned Azure Virtual Machines to another region.

-          In mid December, Xuedong Huang Technical Fellow, Cloud and AI posted that we are previewing neural network text-to-speech. Speech Service, part of Azure Cognitive Services now offers a neural network-powered text-to-speech capability. Neural Text-to-Speech makes the voices of your apps nearly indistinguishable from the voices of people.

-          Just recently I ran across Henry Been's blog. In particular I found his  Azure Policy part 1: Get an alert when something fishy happens post interesting. As of this week, he's actually expanded that topic to include four parts! I also liked his Creating a RBAC Role Assignment, using an ARM template post.

-          Some of my favorite places to read about Azure goings on

o   Thomas Maurer – who has recently blogged on some of the same topics I cover here End of Support and AZ-900 as well as other interesting reads including Azure uses Live Migration for VMs and Azure Update Management using Windows Admin Center

o   Michael Crump – Azure Tips and Tricks – Michael is now up to 177 posts. Some recent ones that caught my eye: Azure Lab Services Demystified, Get the most out of Azure Advisor, ARM Templates Demystified and The BEST of Azure Tips and Tricks is now available as a FREE ebook

o   Azure Updates – about 70 updates (some big, some small, some certain to interest you) were posted in the month of December.

o   My friends down under at Kloud have their fingers in so many pots. While I'm not a fan of all of their posts, their blog is frequently helpful and some posts that I found interesting are Azure Self Service Password Reset Reporting using PowerShell, Low-Cost Rate Limiting for Azure Functions APIs with API Management's Consumption Tier, Overcoming Issues Installing Azure Active Directory Connect and Creating Azure Storage SAS Tokens with ARM Templates.

-          portal.azure.com (Ibiza) it's been three years! – Do you remember back in December 2015 when Leon Welicki announced that the "New Portal" was generally available? People hate change. There was so much complaining, stuff missing, slow performance etc. But that was three years ago. In that time the "new portal" has just become "the portal." It's customizable, shareable and pretty darn performant. Month after month the team continues to improve portal.azure.com. In December a handful of new updates were rolled out and Peri Rocha told us about them. BTW, you can test new things ahead of time to see what's coming and to be able to enjoy new features as soon as you can put your hands on them (like the new Home vs. Dashboard) at preview.portal.azure.com.

-          Did you know that Microsoft recently introduced the Microsoft Learn platform? Learn includes Learning Paths, Hands-on Learning and the opportunity to learn for free.

-          In addition to new training, we have rolled out new exams and role based certifications for Azure Developers, Azure Administrators, and Azure Solutions Architects. There are numerous brand new Azure exams as the 70-5XX exams retire. In my area of expertise, I've taken one of them in beta (don't have my results yet) and three others since they went into production with plans to complete the Expert track this quarter. Exams of interest to me:

o   AZ-900 - Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

o   AZ-100 - Microsoft Azure Infrastructure and Deployment

o   AZ-101 - Microsoft Azure Integration and Security

o   AZ-300 - Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies

o   AZ-301 - Microsoft Azure Architect Design

o   Of course there are many other exams for Azure Developers, Azure DevOps Engineers and some for our Microsoft 365 friends who are interested in Modern Desktop Administrator Associate.

-          I have talked about Microsoft's advantage in the hybrid space before. Having been an enterprise IT company for decades and bringing that experience together with public cloud. Talal Alqinawi shared some of the success that he's seeing in Customers are using Azure Stack to unlock new hybrid cloud innovation.

-          Not new news… Microsoft completed its acquisition of GitHub at the end of October. Official story here and Nat's blog. I'll try to get some GitHub goodness into a future edition. In the meantime, you might watch the 10 minute Five Things About GitHub with John Papa.

-          I always try to include a "fun reading" category…

o   Motley Fool – Better Buy: Amazon vs. Microsoft

o   TechRepublic - Microsoft is telling awesome open source stories

o   Regularly the team shares an Azure Marketplace new offers post. In Volume 28 we see 80 offers that were recently added to Marketplace.

 

Whew! I think that's enough for now. Thanks for sticking with me and making it to the bottom of the January 2019 Luper's Learnings. You've continued to be such a supportive and vocal group, keep sharing topics of interest for future editions.