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5 TIPS FOR MICROSOFT AZURE NEWCOMERS

Introduction Cloud computing is no longer a fad. A decade after its inception by Amazon Web Services (AWS), cloud technology has proved its value, and is becoming the de-facto model for IT resource consumption. As its main advocate, AWS has been sowing the fruits of its labor over the past 10 years, and is the clear leader of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market, with about 30% market share. As such, it’s safe to say that the vast majority of organizations utilizing public cloud are AWS users. Microsoft, who launched Azure as a PaaS in 2010, quickly realized that it would need to offer IaaS in order to successfully compete with AWS. The commercial release of IaaS services in Azure in mid-2013, accompanied by aggressive pricing for customers under existing MS Enterprise Agreements (EAs), proved to be very effective for Microsoft. Since 2013, Microsoft has annual growth rates of over 100% and has become the only contender for Amazon’s market leadership, with an estimated 15% market share in 2015.

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MS Azure is the only leader (besides AWS) in Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for IaaS

Source: Gartner

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Even with the huge traction Azure is gaining in the market, industry jargon is still ruled by AWS. So whether you’re just now adopting cloud technology with Azure, or adding Azure as an additional provider to your organization’s multi-cloud strategy, we thought it could be useful to list the top five things you need to know about Azure, both as a standalone and compared to AWS. Enjoy! 1. Virtual instances come in three different abstraction levels

In a classic IaaS environment (either public or private), users provision virtualized servers (or instances). These may come in different flavors, sizes and operating systems, but essentially, they’re a bare-bones server and it’s up to you, the user, to install your application, define system architecture, connectivity and scaling, maintain operating systems and middleware and re-size in case of congestion and over-utilization. Originally a PaaS, Microsoft Azure added an IaaS offering in mid-2013, as a (successful) attempt to catch up with Amazon’s domination of the cloud market. Azure’s IaaS virtual machine service was plainly named “Virtual Machines” by Microsoft, and in hindsight, led to a tremendous rise in Azure adoption and triple-figure growth in the following years. On the other side of the “X-aaS” spectrum, Azure offers “App Services”, which is a fully managed PaaS. This allows users to focus on their data and application development and leave the rest (hardware, OS, middleware, networking, load balancing, resilience and scaling) to Azure. In the middle of the “X-aaS” spectrum is Microsoft’s original PaaS offering, called “Cloud services”. This service provides a PaaS, while still having some control and management capabilities over the architecture and underlying virtual machines. “Cloud Services” instances are divided into “web roles” (web servers) and “worker roles” (application servers and general workload processing).

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Microsoft nicely sums up this topic with a graphic and a table:

Source: Microsoft Azure Documentation

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2. “Block is Object?!” - Storage terminology may be confusing When discussing storage, there are two main types: Object Storage and Block Storage. In AWS, block storage service is called “EBS” or “Elastic Block Storage” and object storage is called “S3” or Simple Storage Service. In Azure, the terminology may be confusing. Azure storage services are called “Blobs”, and these Blobs can be used for block, object and other types of storage (tables, queues, etc.). Now comes the tricky part: object storage blobs are called “Block Blobs”, while disk-like block storage blobs are called “Page Blobs”. The naming is counter-intuitive, so pay close attention to the types of blobs you provision.

AWS Azure

Block Storage Elastic Block Storage (EBS) Page Blobs Object Storage Simple Storage Service (S3) Block Blobs

3. Azure pricing is ALWAYS on-demand...but there are still discounts

One of the main concepts of cloud computing is the “on-demand” consumption model. As such, “on demand” pricing is also the prevalent cloud pricing model. AWS, for instance employs three different pricing models for its EC2 (compute) services:

• On-demand: The basic, per-hour pricing. Pay for what you use. • Spot: Significant discount (70-90% over on-demand) in return for lower SLA and

higher volatility. The machine can be terminated by AWS at any time, with only a 2-minute warning.

• Reserved Instances: Significant discount (~30% over on-demand), in return for an upfront commitment for 1 or 3 years of usage.

Microsoft Azure supports only one pricing model - per-hour, on-demand. This, however, does not mean that Microsoft does not offer discounts to its users. Instead, Microsoft uses its Enterprise Agreement (EA), which has long been Microsoft’s preferred method of discounting its software to large organizations. The EA can also include Azure, with upfront monetary commitments to Azure usage, and a discounted price list, respective to the size of the commitment. Seeing as EAs are Microsoft's greatest tool for customer retention, this too has accelerated Azure’s growth over the last two years.

4. Account structures in Azure have a different approach than AWS

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In AWS, accounts are structured in two main methods: • Standalone: A single account, billed monthly • Consolidated: Multiple accounts can be grouped together, where one account is

designated the “payer account”, and all others are “linked accounts”, whose bill is paid by the “payer account”. Both “payer” and “linked” accounts consume AWS resources.

Azure offers a somewhat different account structure:

• Standard pay-as-you-go model:

§ Subscription: a single basic entity, billed monthly, much like a standalone AWS account.

§ Account: An administrative entity, overseeing multiple subscriptions. This could be compared to an AWS consolidated account, with a clear difference: In an AWS consolidated account both administers linked accounts and consumes resources itself. An Azure account is completely administrative and cannot provision resources for itself (only under one of the underlying subscriptions).

• Under EA:

§ Subscriptions and accounts have the same roles under an EA as their pay-as-you-go counterparts.

§ Enterprise Enrollment: As accounts are registered to an EA, they become an administered entity in the enterprise Azure cloud, and gain all the benefits of being under an EA. Again, subscriptions are the only entities which actually consume resources, while accounts and enterprise enrollment are only administrative entities.

§ Departments and cost centers: In order to create a tiered, detailed approach to account/subscription hierarchy, Microsoft now offers two additional “virtual” hierarchies. This means that “departments” and “cost centers” are not administrative entities, but rather, are “tags” with which accounts are tagged, attributing them to a department/cost center in the enterprise.

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Top: AWS account structure (left) vs. Azure account structure (right) Bottom: Azure Enterprise Enrollment

5. A single solution to monitor them all…

As recent research shows, the prominent cloud architecture adopted by organizations today is the multi-cloud/hybrid-cloud architecture:

• Multi-Cloud: In order to enjoy the benefits from different cloud providers and to prevent vendor lock-in, enterprises tend to deploy public cloud resources with more than one provider.

• Hybrid Cloud: It’s clear to IT professionals that some of the workloads cannot, or should not, be migrated to public cloud and must be kept on-prem in the private cloud. The combination of private and public clouds is defined as hybrid cloud architecture.

While each of the providers might boast its own usage and cost management tools, these tools will only handle one cloud at a time. For a true hybrid/multi- cloud deployment, you will need a solution which can provide visibility into usage, cost and performance across

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multiple public and private clouds, as well as optimization and governance of your complete cloud deployment, from a single pane of glass.

Multi-Cloud Visibility from a single pane of glass Source: Cloudyn

Summary

Over the past two years, we have witnessed massive growth in Microsoft Azure adoption, making it a large-scale player in public cloud computing, closing in on the market leader AWS. Understanding the common terminology of cloud computing is a good start towards adopting multi-cloud architectures, however it’s not enough. It’s equally important to understand how provider-agnostic jargon is mapped within each of the providers, and the subtle differences in pricing and consumption models.

For more information on different cloud providers and on Cloudyn’s solutions for managing your multi-cloud environment, contact us at info@cloudyn.com

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Founded in 2011, Cloudyn is the leader in cloud monitoring and optimization. The company’s industry award-winning SaaS solution delivers unprecedented insights into usage, performance, and cost, coupled with custom prescriptive actions for enhancing performance and reducing cloud spend .With more than 10,000,000 virtual instances monitored Cloudyn helps businesses select the right mix of cloud vendors, increase operational performance, reduce cloud costs to bring them under optimum control, and capitalize on customer choice. More than 2,400 customers use Cloudyn’s technology worldwide including F500 industry leaders in aerospace, infrastructure, consumer online travel services, IT management consulting, and manufacturing . For more information, interested parties may visit www.cloudyn.com.

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