Comparing Costs : Is Cloud more expensive than an On Premises setup?

Introduction

In my role as a Cloud Solution Architect, I’m often faced with the statement that cloud is expensive. My reply is always that Cloud is not expensive (more expensive than On Premises) if you take into account all the costs involved. As this is an easy statement to make… I made an effort to create a cost comparison for four different scenario’s (in term of deployment size) and stacked “OnPremises” vs “Cloud”.

In this post we’ll discuss this calculation and ensure that we are comparing apples to apples!

 

Design Decisions

Opinion : Hybrid Cloud =/= Hybrid Cloud, and how does private cloud link to that?

Introduction

Earlier today I retweeted the following tweet…

@valb00 Here is an illustrated guide to @swardley 's cloud definitions pic.twitter.com/yDqDvxlBmd

— Mark Beaupre (@mark_beaupre) February 21, 2017

Which got the following reply…

@mark_beaupre @kvaes @valb00 @swardley

Pub/Priv hybrid cloud solves issues of budget, commercial leverage, and organisational alignment.

— Adrian (@AdrianAtRedHat) February 21, 2017

Today’s post is an opinion piece in regards to my take on “hybrid” cloud. This as I can relate to both statements made here.

 

“All clouds are equal, but some clouds are more equal than others.”

If you have ever had the (un)pleasantry of seeing my present on cloud in a non-technical manner, then you must have seen this slide…

Cloud Migration Strategies – The Subway Map!

A while ago I saw a kinda flow chart / subway map entailing the various paths to migrate your workloads to the cloud. My personal view on the matter differed slightly from this, so I’ve mocked up my own version…

 

 

The various tracks ;

• “Retire” ; For the workloads that are not relevant anymore to the business… decommission them.
• “Re-Host” ; A typical “lift & shift” scenario where you move the system “as-is” to the cloud.
  • Variant “Manual” ; Tedious effort… doing a manual rebuild of your systems in the cloud.
  • Variant “Automated” ; Work via migration tooling or redirect your automated deployments.
• “Re-Purchase” ; Some applications are not compatible with cloud platforms. Therefore it might sometimes be interesting to purchase another software suite. Where you’ll join the manual track once the implementation starts…
• “Re-Platform” ; Cloud provider typically offer “PaaS”-services too, where an On Premises deployment only favors “IaaS”-thinking. Examples here ; IIS on premises vs Webapps in the cloud.
• “Re-Architect” ; If you have control over your application, you might consider to refactor it towards cloud native components. Given, this is not always an easy/cheap task, but it’s a play considering the long term.

But for all, it starts with ;

• Discover ; Identify all the workloads in your IT landscape.
• Assess ; Investigate their readiness towards the cloud and which migration paths are viable.

And “ends” with ;

• Validate ; After a “construct” / “deploy”, always validate (test) if everything is according to your expectations / specifications.
• Transition ; Never forget to ensure that your operational team is ready before the “go live” of your workload.
• Go-Live ; The moment your customers will use the workload. 🙂

Azure : How to prepare for maintenance impacting your Virtual Machines

Introduction

A topic that’s often discussed in workshops is “Availability Sets“. And during that topic, a question/comment that pops up every time ; “Can I schedule the maintenance for my VMs, because…”. Today we’ll delve into that part.

 

Why do we need maintenance?

For some this might seem like a very odd question to pose and that is a given fact of life. Though some organisations live by the mantra “if it isn’t broke, why fix it”, and once a systems gets deployed, they’ll (try) never to touch it again…

How to roll your own rss2twitter bot in 15 minutes in Azure?

Introduction

For today I’ll show you how to roll your own rss2twitter bot in about 15 minutes. What will this bot do?

• Check an RSS feed for new entries
• Parse the new entry and replace key words with hashtags
• Post it to twitter

For this we’ll be using ;

• Azure Function : as the customer code to find/replace certain words
• Logic App : as the tool to create our process via a visual tool

And in the end, we’ll see something like this ;

Azure : Oracle Licensing changes in 2017

Introduction

A question that I often receive is what about Oracle in the cloud? Because their license politics is far from virtualization friendly. The good news is that the policy is very clear in terms of cloud ;

Microsoft Azure – count one Azure CPU Core as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license.

The ugly thing is that since the end of January, the following statement was added ;

When counting Oracle Processor license requirements in Authorized Cloud Environments, the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table is not applicable.

Today’s post is to take a look at the licensing and how the current model (of 2017) impacts Azure customers.

Azure : Renewing the SSL Certificate of the Azure Application Gateway

Introduction

Today’s post is about changing the SSL Certificate of an Application Gateway. Why a post about this? Isn’t it a more upload button… You would think so. When creating the listener, it’s a nice & easy UI. Though I guess someone forgot the renew flow. 😉 This is the screen when you take a look at the HTTP listener. We see the certificate, but no way to edit this part…

So we’ll have to do this manually, via powershell!

Extending a Storage Spaces Direct pool on Azure

Introduction

Yesterday we talked about the combination of Azure+S2D+SOFS+MSSQL. Here we had a cluster where each node had two P20 disks. What if at a given point we would need more than 1TB of disk space? We’ll be extending the pool (and virtual disk etc). So let’s take a look what that would look like?

 

Adding the disks

First part… Let’s add the disks (note : even entire hosts is possible!). Browse to both VMs and press “attach new” in the disks section ;

Ever tried the mix of Azure, SQL Server, Storage Spaces Direct & Scale Out File Server?

Introduction

A while back I posted a blog post how to setup a High Available SQL cluster on Azure using SIOS Datakeeper. As I’m an avid believer of storage spaces, I was looking for a moment to test drive “storage spaces direct” on Azure. The blog post of today will cover that journey…

UPDATE (01/02/2017) ; At this point, there is no official support for this solution. So do not implement it for production at this point. As soon as this changes, I’ll update this post accordingly!

UPDATE (08/02/2017) ; New official documentation has been released. Though I cannot find official support statements.

UPDATE (30/03/2017) ; A few days after the previous update, the following post was made => Deploying IaaS VM Guest Clusters in Microsoft Azure

 

Solution Blueprint

What do we want to build today?

• A two node cluster which will be used as a Failover Cluster Instance for MSSQL.
• As a quorum, we’ll be using the cloud witness feature of Windows 2016 in combination with an Azure storage account.
• In regards to storage, we’ll create a Scale Out File Server setup which will leverage the local disks of the two servers via Storage Spaces Direct.
• To achieve a “floating IP”, we’ll be using the Azure LoadBalancer setup (as we did in the last post).