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AzureSUCCESS
AzureSUCCESS
Azure Arc
Contrary to popular belief, our customer's like to play in more than one cloud (say it isn't so, coach; say it isn't so!) They even like to keep some of their workloads on-prem. Never fear, however, because Microsoft has one platform to rule them all: Azure Arc. Listen in as Vlad "Not the Impaler" Tomsa lets us in on the secret.
BIO: Vlad is a Cloud Architect with a passion for technology and its ability to transform the world around us. He has extensive experience on the Cloud Infrastructure, Datacenter Migration, Applications, Identity and Networking. Before joining Microsoft in 2008, he worked as a System Administrator at several firms. At Microsoft, he was first responsible for supporting Enterprise Customers with design reviews and solving complex problem. Then he moved to a Consulting role, designing and implementing Identity, Security and Messaging projects with EMEA customers, after which he became a Cloud Solution Architect working with Belux and now US customers on their digital transformation and journey to the cloud.
LINKS: Azure Arc, Welcome to Azure Arc, Azure Arc | Bring Windows Server and SQL Server into Azure Arc management (2020)
CREDITS: Louis Berman (Host); Vlad Tomsa (Guest); Dan Phillipson / PremiumBeat (Music); Anne Lamb (Intro/Outro); East Coast Studio (Editing)
MORE: visit https://azure-success.com for additional episodes, plus transcripts, and more ways to listen to the show. As to your comments and suggestions, please feel free to email your host, Louis Berman, at lberman@microsoft.com
When you have a lot of environments, you're on frame. You have Azure, you have Google, you have AWS and so on. It becomes very difficult to manage all of those in essentially a unified way. Right? This is a key ask from customers. How can I manage everything in one place?
Speaker 2:You're listening to Azure success, the podcast by and for, as your professionals listen in, and you'll be sure to speak your customers March into the cloud. And now your host, Lois Berman. Hello,
Speaker 1:Welcome to another episode of ask for success. The podcast by and for Azure professionals, I'm really pleased today to have my colleagues, senior cloud solution architect, Brad Thompson, about I screwed up that name. It's really important to note. I screwed it up, even though I promised him I was going to screw up and he actually coached me in it. Bled is Romanian, not Vlad the Impaler, by the way, as he told me, literally on our first meeting, but anyway, black, why don't you say hi? Hi folks. My name is Tom Shaw. Louis did try his best to get my name, right. So I really appreciate the effort. It was so bad. I, you know, I was holding it in my head and then it was like, I have nothing. I have literally nothing. So anyway, we're here to talk about Azure Brad, when he told us what the hell Azure arc is. Anyway, I really like Azure org. And the idea behind it is bringing databases, bringing containers, bringing servers that may or may not be in Azure. Imagine they are in Google or AWS or in an on prem environment, bringing them all under a common management umbrella. That's the gist of Azure arm. Got it. But it runs in the cloud, right? Absolutely. It's an Azure based service. So it's perfect for customers who are in a multicloud world. And a lot of customers are not only using one but multiple clouds. And it really helps with, you know, we understand you're not only going to run Azure. You might want to run something in Google or in AWS. You know, everyone releases new services. Maybe you like something about that specific service. There is, you know, an amazing promotion you want to take advantage of sure you can do all of it from within Azure, which offers a lot of, you know, multicloud and hybrid management tools and solutions and Azure arc is basically bringing it all together. Single pane of glass. I mean, we've had lots of other things that did something like this, right? I mean, system center, moms, perhaps other things. Why is this different? Why is this interesting? If you look at system center, system center is basically doing your data center management, right? We try to position it as doing hybrid cloud management, but in reality it always did. And it's very good at data center management only that's its core competency. Azure arc is really our first cross-cloud and on frame management solution.
Speaker 3:Got it. If I may make a plug also, I once took a four and a half day mandatory test for system center and I tried hard to understand it. And it was so incredibly unapproachable. I walked away knowing less than I, I think I knew when I came to the thing, I, I think Azure Ark is very much the opposite, right? It's pretty approachable, right.
Speaker 1:You know, it's really built in a very agile manner and we keep adding new and new functionality. It's not the behemoth that is system center systems that are, has so many moving pieces. By the time you were finished implementing it, there are two new versions ahead. And you have to spend again that same amount of time upgrading your system center, right? This is really very easy to get started. And,
Speaker 3:And how has it paid for, I mean, we were from Microsoft. So I think we should tell you your listener, that we want you to spend a lot of money, but how has it,
Speaker 1:It's an excellent question. The good thing is right now it's free of charge.
Speaker 3:Oh my God. For me here, I was prepared to pay it, screw me up
Speaker 1:Because it's in preview. Once it becomes GA, there will be much more deals shared around costs. So if you have the credit card ready more than happy,
Speaker 3:Excellent. I'm going to make a supposition because this is pretty much what I've experienced with all of our Azure services. They're they're price. Great. Right. You know, and I know you can say I'm just a chauffeur for Microsoft, but I have found that a Microsoft, we do very reasonable pricing and frequently prices get lower and lower and lower and lower, lower over times, like the cost of storage being one of, one of those great examples. So terrific. Tell me is some capabilities that you really like in arc. I mean, it would be specific.
Speaker 1:I'm going to think of the example of Kubernetes. Imagine that you're a company, you have, you have Kubernetes running on premises, right? You also have Kubernetes running in Azure and you've dabbled a bit in Google as well. Right. So one thing is how do you see all of your Kubernetes clusters in a single place, but more importantly, how can you manage govern? How do you apply policies and how do you deploy right to those clusters in a unified way? And this is what Azure arc containers does. Microsoft is, is a very open minded and really is taking open source at heart. And this is showing an Azure arc because we don't force you to use EKS. Right? You can bring in AKGs, you can bring in GKE, you can bring in the container management from AWS or on-prem or OpenShift. Right. And you bring them all within your Azure arc management pane. And then you can do your config deployment, for example, or your application deployment from GitHub. And you can push it to all of those Kubernetes clusters.
Speaker 3:Well, you obviously like it. So that's great. So I'm going to get into why other people should like at first, but let's talk about you a little bit. So you come from Romania, I've never been, but my wife has been to Romania and unfortunately we have to be told you're not Vlad the Impaler, but Marie did was gush about what a lovely country it is. Lad, the impellers castle was apparently the cutest building on the face of the planet. And so it's apparently level's place, but you're also, you're sort of obsessed with traveling, right? Not that you can in a COBIT sort of sense, but why don't you talk about that a little bit?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I believe, you know, traveling allows you to really discover and interact with people. It allows you to learn and share, you know, your culture. And it's something that I find very enriching. I'm really keen on traveling to as many places and meeting as many people as possible. Of course, during covert times, I'm mainly traveling from my living room to my master bedroom, to my child's room. And you know, it's kind of a circle.
Speaker 3:We can play a little inside pool. It's really important to know where, where have you traveled this moment today? Where are you exactly young man
Speaker 1:Right now? I'm very close to Washington DC.
Speaker 3:No, no, he, he didn't take the bait. Vlad is sitting in his master closet because we unfortunately due to COVID, we have to do these recordings remotely. And apparently that's quite as, quite as place
Speaker 1:I was trying to, I was trying to, you know, to keep a detail confidential, but yes,
Speaker 3:Yes, well maybe we can fix it in post. So, you know, I could climb into my masters. So where are some places that you have traveled?
Speaker 1:I've had the pleasure of traveling to Africa and traveling to Asia. The last with a really exciting destination that I went to was Kenya and that was in 2018. It was a fantastic experience. Really
Speaker 3:Excellent. What was great about it? I mean, were you down there for business or are you just replaced?
Speaker 1:I actually went on a volunteering within Microsoft. It's a project called for Africa where you get to go and use your technical skills to help Microsoft partners, to help the local community upskill their technical level and come up with new innovative projects. So I went and did that for a week. And then I was lucky enough to be able to take a week off and really meet and explore the country, which was great. I mean, it has everything you can think of from fantastic Safari places where you get to see lions, you get to see a lot of animals in the wild, which is the best bar. And then it has some of the world's most amazing beaches by the Indian ocean. Yeah. It's fantastic.
Speaker 3:That is very cool. You lead a lucky life. Apparently I had no idea. You could do such a thing in Microsoft. Let's get back to topic. So we know a little bit about what Azure Ark is, but you know, why would I a customer be interested in adopting it? I know it's great. I know you apparently love it, but why should I take the plunge?
Speaker 1:It's very simple. When you have a lot of environments, you're on prem, you have Azure, you have Google, you have AWS and so on. It becomes very difficult to manage all of those in essentially a unified way, right? This is a key ask from customers. How can I manage everything in one place? Well, this is what Azure AHRQ fundamentally does, right? It brings in your servers wherever they live, it brings in your Coobernetti's and your database services. So you get to do everything, you know, from identity policies, governance, deployment in one place while giving you the freedom to choose whatever you like.
Speaker 3:Okay. And so you think the story is basically compelling enough. So let's go into the next piece of it. How do you pitch it to who firstly, who do you pitch it to? Right. We're all sellers on this podcast release. We are talking from the camera lens of being a seller. So how do you sell it? How do you, and I don't mean sell it for money, but I mean, pitch it, well,
Speaker 1:I may sound like a broken record, but it's really the idea of having the single management. The single pane of glass is the key selling point and I've used it and we've used it with several customers who were considering both Azure and Google and some other work considering Azure and AWS. And really the argument that won the deal was Azure are because we said, sure, you know, it's not only one cloud. Why you want to use multiple clouds and you can do this from our cloud, right? You can choose a service that you like, and that makes sense for you from other clouds. But then you can reuse all of your investments in Azure and have a single way to deploy, manage and operate those services. Right? So it's enhancing the value of Azure while it allows you to use whatever you like from other clouds and from your on prem environment, because not every customer is ready to move from the next day to the cloud. They might have some solutions and applications locally that they want to manage in a cloud way. I got it. How do you find out more? Are there learning paths? Are there videos or stuff, anything that you recommend it starting from presentations done at ignite? Because we publicly announced this at ignite 2019. You know, the new ignite is very close a couple of months, so there will be a lot of new brief content and announcements done then. And if you go to our docs page docs that I might have that calm, you can actually test and use Ark today in your environment. And something that, uh, you know, I want to highlight is Azure. Our right now has three main pillars. One is servers, the other one is Kubernetes. And the other one is data services, right? And the first two they're publicly available in preview, they can be tested today. The other one is for now a private preview. You know, something else I'd like to mention is give a quick comparison of Azure arc to what is out there from AWS and Google. Google has what's called and thus, and, and us has been there a bit before Kubernetes, but Andros is really very opinionated. It only allows you to manage GKE. So Google's Kubernetes engine, wherever it may run, right? So you can deploy GKE today on premises. You can deploy it in Google. We can employ in AWS. And I think pretty soon in Azure, but it only allows you to manage that. If you have AKA S you have some, you know, open source, Kubernetes distribution, you're out of luck, you have open shifts stuff like you won't be able to do it, right. And if you look on AWS, AWS doesn't have anything comparable because to me, AWS is philosophy is trying to get everything in AWS without realizing that there's a lot more out there than AWS and something that completes the Azure, our vision, if you want, is our Azure stack family. And the family has a lot of components here, but we are the only cloud provider today to offer both multicloud and hybrid data center management through Azure Ark and offer Azure services in your data center through the Azure stack family. Right? Got it. Google only has the Azure arc equivalent, which is an bus, but it's really opinionated and Verde specific. And AWS only has outposts, which is the Azure stack equivalent. So
Speaker 3:Basically we're heading shoulders above, which is by the way, I think the basic theme for Azure in general, I know a lot of people love AWS in particular or GCP, which feels quite frankly far and distant third in the competition, but we have so much to offer. One thing I should note, and perhaps you can comment on this is, you know, right now it's free. I'm sure it's going to be a very economical service. It sort of fits in the same guys that lots of other things like, like at, as your cost adviser, right? It's helping you to do things in Azure state. So, so my theory is for Azure sellers, why they should sell this and I'm using air quotes around it is because this helps the movement into Azure, right? It supports off Azure on prem, but it also makes the case for moving things into Azure, more compelling. Is that true? Or are there things I should figure out about it?
Speaker 1:I definitely agree with what you said about Azure arc as a customer. You know, when you're choosing you, you may do a lot of comparison and you know, the customer may have a lot of questions, but you know, we are able to say, choose Azure, right? And we give you the freedom and we give you the tools more importantly, to go outside of Azure and use other services, right? While using our platform at the same time, this is the beauty of it. I've seen this vision actually winning
Speaker 3:Deals for customers. And we're kind of in between, right? What do we do? Did we go Azure? Or did we go AWS? And the beauty of it is we offer choice, right? Azure is all about choice. It's about meeting the customer where the customer is and not forcing something necessarily on him. Excellent. Well, that seems like a good place to wrap. Thank you so much for taking the time. Talk about Azure arc and, uh, you know, since no good deed goes unpunished, I'm going to ask you to do an internal demo for our team about it and to help us understand it more. So I'm talking to Vlad, Tom Shaw. I got that slightly better. I think around the Impaler and a senior cloud solutions architect on our team. Thank you so much and do check out the website as your success that buzzsprout.com for more episodes and additional info about episodes. And we hope to see you soon. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 2:You've been listening to Azure success, the podcast by and for Azure professionals, you can visit our website, azure-success.com for show notes, helpful links and other episodes, but also to leave your questions, comments, and suggestions. Thank you for listening.