We are only two days into Microsoft Ignite and I thought I would share the announcements which I believe will become ‘heavy hitters’ in the near future.
Planned Maintenance (Preview)
One of the biggest deal breakers when migrating to public cloud, is the shear amount of single instance VMs in a customer estate which relay upon infrastructure availability to meet business SLA’s. The cost to translate this into cloud native applications to place them into an Availability Group to receive an SLA from Microsoft and to minimise the impact of planned maintenance is often too burdensome, so they are left to wither on the vine on-premises.
Microsoft have recognised this issue and have announced ‘Planned Maintenance’ which means that you will be notified of when maintenance is going to occur and you will have up to four weeks to schedule in a reboot of your virtual machine.
This is a game changer for customers, and I would encourage you to read more here.
Azure Migrate (Preview)
To start the journey to public cloud services, you need to understand your application estate. This is a process which should not be under estimated as many customer environments are poorly documented, application owners have left the business, operations and IT don’t really understand how an application is coupled together so trying to migrate anything but low hanging fruit often gets placed into the ‘too hard to deal with bucket’.
To counter act this, Microsoft have announced Azure Migrate which uses an application based approach for the following:
- Discovery and assessment for on-premises virtual machines
- Inbuilt dependency mapping for high-confidence discovery of multi-tier applications
- Intelligent rightsizing to Azure virtual machines
- Compatibility reporting with guidelines for remediating potential issues
- Integration with Azure Database Management Service for database discovery and migration
I wondering if this will be a PaaS offering of Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit? Any how read more here.
Azure File Sync (Preview)
You would have thought with the advent of SharePoint and OneDrive for Business that the traditional file server would be on the way out, however file storage still continues to be an issue for many companies. Microsoft have announced Azure File Sync which enables you to replicate file data across the globe and tier data from on-premises to Microsoft Azure without a StoreSimple device.
When more details are announced, I will be interested to understand how Microsoft deal with file locking and if this will be dealt with using Optimistic Concurrency, Pessimistic Concurrent or Last Writer Wins. Also backup of data needs to be addressed as well.
For more information see here.
Azure DDoS Protection Service (Preview)
Security is always a hot topic when discussing public cloud services, figuring how you protect the ‘crown jewels’ is difficult and can be difficult to get Information Security Risk officers to agree on your approach.
To counter act this Microsoft have announced Azure DDoS Protection Service which in a nutshell protects a virtual network and everything behind it. The service understands your normal application traffic profiles using machine learning and detects malicious traffic attacks. Azure DDoS Protection can also be combined with Web Application Firewalls to provide protection from:
- Request rate-limiting
- HTTP Protocol Violations
- HTTP Protocol Anomalies
- SQL Injection
- Cross site scripting
For more information see here.
VMFocus 