Cloud Computing Articles

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-20-2022

Amazon Web Services (AWS) started out small, but has become a vast collection of cloud services that businesses can use to support any activity without having to invest in an IT infrastructure.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-23-2022

Digital transformation is the mantra of many organizations. There is no debate about it: Cloud computing has changed the way businesses operate. Small and mid-sized organizations may be all in on the cloud, while large enterprises are a hybrid and multicloud strategy. The cloud is helping startups challenge industry stalwarts, while at the same time, traditional companies are changing. The first phase of cloud adoption was mostly about cutting costs and changing technology spend from a capital expense to an operating expense. For many years, cloud vendors were focused on reducing costs for commodity compute and storage. While reducing costs is still a major driver of cloud adoption, companies are now leveraging cloud services to transform their businesses. The focus of cloud computing has shifted from reducing costs to gaining business agility, providing developers with the tools they demand and ultimately providing excellent customer care. It’s safe to assume that your organization uses some kind of cloud computing, whether it’s a CRM (customer relationship manager) or HR (human recourses) Software as a Service offerings or Cloud native container-based software development services.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-14-2021

If I were to summarize the best approach to Microsoft Azure in three words, those words would be “always be learning.” The Azure product development teams release new features every workday, so if you aren’t actively working to stay current, you’ll fall behind, and your career will suffer. This Cheat Sheet provides you some reminders of some essential ingredients in Azure automation. Remember that the Azure portal is all well and good until you’re tasked with deploying 50 virtual machines!

Article / Updated 06-09-2020

Planning your hybrid cloud computing strategy is a journey, not a simple set of steps. The right planning strategy is imperative to getting your plan to be operational. So, you need to look at the technical components, the business strategy, and the organizational plan. You have to focus on bringing all constituents to have a common understanding of how the cloud provides an opportunity for success. Remember that cloud computing can offer a dramatic change in the pace and style of computing as well as business strategy. Therefore, although costs will, of course, be imperative, you also need to think about the benefits that may help transform the customer experience. Your overall strategy will include a hybrid of different types and models of computing, so planning will be integral to your path forward. Here, we give you an idea about what to expect as you begin your journey to the cloud, along with the important issues you need to consider. At the beginning: the move to the cloud In the initial decade of cloud computing, very few businesses had a strategy. Primarily, departmental developers tired of having to wait for IT to provide them with the resources they needed to get the job done turned to public cloud services. These capabilities were inexpensive, elastic, and based on a self-service model. This approach to computing caught on across organizations across the globe. While this ad hoc approach to using the public cloud was pragmatic, it began to cause problems. Because no planning occurred, financial managers began to see the cost of computing skyrocket. While an individual developer wasn’t paying much to build an application in the cloud, when all those bills were aggregated together, the costs began to spiral out of control. In addition, there was little control over security and governance. Business units began to use SaaS applications at an ever-increasing pace. IT initially ignored the cloud and assumed that its use would not last. Managers viewed the use of this third-party service as a threat to the role of IT in the business. In addition, many business leaders were concerned that security in the public cloud was flawed and would put the business at risk. Some managers tried to sabotage the acceptability of cloud services. This approach was typical of any new technology that threatened to change the status quo. What changed? In simple terms, the pace of business. Well established businesses began to notice the emergence of a new generation of companies that relied on the cloud and would therefore create new business models without having to requiring the lead time to create a new physical infrastructure. In many competitive markets, there was only one option: Move to the cloud. Many companies have either begun their move to the cloud or in the planning stages. It can be overwhelming to come up with a strategy that enables the organization to select the right services, the clouds that are best suited for the workloads, and create an environment where change is the norm. It is not easy to determine what to do first. Do you pick a single product and select a cloud platform? Do you get rid of your data center and move all of your existing services to a public or private cloud? Do you select a single public cloud vendor to support all of your workloads? Do you hire a staff of experienced IT professionals to build a private cloud, or do you hire a consulting firm to make all the decisions for you? There isn’t simply one option that will handle all of your business situations and all of your workloads. Therefore, there best approach is to come up with a staged plan that will help you achieve your business and technical objectives. An overall cloud computing strategy is like any other business strategy; it must be planned within the context of your business goals and objectives. So, before you begin your journey to the cloud, we suggest that you take the five steps, outlined as stages, described in the following sections. Stage 1: Assess your current IT strategy Your first step is to assess the current state of your IT strategy and how well it serves the business. IT organizations have typically grown in a relatively unplanned fashion. Although they likely began as well-orchestrated sets of hardware and software, over time they have grown into a collection of various computing silos. You might think of them as being like a typical two-car garage. In the beginning, the garage held two cars and a few necessities such as yard tools. Over the years, the homeowner began to store lots of different paraphernalia in the garage, ranging from unused pots and pans to an array of old furniture. Suddenly, that well-planned, purpose-built space became crammed with so much stuff that it’s hard to use the garage for its initial intent — storing cars! Today, is your IT infrastructure like that garage, or is it a well-planned and well-orchestrated environment? Does it provide the type of flexibility and manageability that supports new initiatives and business change? Or is it an assortment of different servers, different software products, and a variety of disconnected tools? Do you have many different departments that are taking advantage of a variety of public cloud services from different vendors? Do you already use third party cloud services for specialized needs? Most likely your business has a combination of all of these environments. Your first step is taking an honest assessment of where you are today. What is working well and what is holding you back? You can’t undertake this process in isolation; you need to create a task force that brings together business and IT leaders along with those who will develop and deploy services across the business. You should look at what systems are critical to the operations of the business and which applications no longer support changing business needs. You need to consider the flexibility of your existing infrastructure. What happens when the business requires a change in processes? How does the IT organization support partnership initiatives? Take a look at the cloud services including SaaS applications as well as cloud applications built in different divisions. In addition, you need to assess the data that is critical to managing your business. Where does the data reside? Is it tied to a specific application? Do you store your data across various parts of the environment? Does some of your data reside in public or private clouds? You need to understand your data and the process that you use today to control that data. Stage 2: Imagine the future Once you understand what you have today and how effective your IT environment is in executing your strategy, it is time to look into the future. What will your business look like in six months and in three years? Who were your competitors two years ago and who are your competitors now? Do you anticipate that your industry is changing dramatically that will impact your ability to compete and collaborate? Are there technological approaches that your emerging competitors are starting to implement that you will have to embrace? Are there opportunities to offer new business strategies that are driven by emerging technologies? It may be that your industry is changing, and without new technology approaches you will not be able to sustain a competitive advantage. This process, which is imperative to planning for a hybrid and multicloud strategy. You will most likely have workloads that live in your data center or in the private cloud. You will need to prepare for your hybrid cloud strategy so that you are ready for †he unanticipated changes in your business. Through the planning process, both the business and IT organization will have a deeper understanding of both the changes to the business and the technologies that will help manage that change in a predictable manner. This process of imaging the future and tying that future to innovative technologies isn’t a one time effort. Rather you should assume that you will continue to update your plan as new competitors enter your market and as new innovative technologies emerge. Stage 3: Explore what’s out there Armed with the knowledge of the current state of your business and the supporting IT infrastructure and where it is headed, now is the time to learn and experiment with cloud computing options. Although plenty of organizations will be happy to do all the work for you, it’s important that you spend the time understanding the landscape of best practices, as well as different cloud computing options that can help the business. Spend time with your peers and see what type of cloud strategy they have adopted and the type of dividends it’s paying. What are the best practices that have worked well for companies in your industry or of your size? What are the new innovations coming to market from young companies? How can you offer a new approach to business that will allow you to effectively compete with much larger companies in your market? The wonderful thing about cloud computing capabilities and offerings is that you are free to experiment. Almost every company in the cloud market offers free trials of their technology. There are many open source offerings as well that will give you the opportunity to test out whether different options will serve your business now or in the long run. This education process is critical so that you know what questions to ask. Even if and when you turn to a service provider for help, you will be able to make better decisions about how you approach your cloud strategy. Stage 4: Create a hybrid cloud strategy plan At this stage, you’re ready to start creating the actual plan. Again, this should be based on a joint effort between the business and IT. If your company has done planning for a different way to think about your technology services. You won’t be building monolithic applications. Rather, you will be building microservices that will be building blocks to create new creative services that will keep you ahead of the competition. While you are spending your time rethinking your business and imaging the future, don’t lose sight of what you actually know about your industry and business. Take advantage of the strategic planning you have already done. Always leverage the knowledge and expertise inside your company as a starting point. It’s also a good idea to get your most strategic partners involved in the process. Your best partners, suppliers, and customers will help you better understand how they want to collaborate with you in the future. Use all this as the foundation for your hybrid cloud strategy. We use the term hybrid because more than likely you will not leverage a single deployment model for your workloads. You will have some public clouds, some private clouds and a data center. Your strategy needs to take into account where you want to run your workloads. Where you deploy your workloads will depend on issues related to latency, costs, and reliability. At the same time, you need to take into account your security, privacy, and governance policies that your company needs to adhere to. These issues need to become part of how you approach cloud computing in your company. For example, different industries have different regulations that you will have to conform to. Some countries have laws that restrict where and how customer information can be managed and stored. This must be considered for your hybrid cloud strategy. Stage 5: Plan for implementation Now you’re ready for action. However, it’s not practical to try to do everything at once. Most companies will need a staged implementation of a hybrid cloud strategy in which they deploy parts of the overall plan in phases. For example, the first phase might be to support all of the existing public cloud workloads by working in collaboration with business units so they have resources for management and security, for example. You will want to determine, for example, how many departments and individuals are using various cloud services so that you can negotiate better financial terms. If your company is new to the cloud you may want to begin by selecting a few key projects that are well suited to the cloud. For example, select a SaaS application that is useful across various departments that has visibility. Begin experimenting with creating microservices and managing them within containers. You can also select a software development project that has a short deadline and build and deploy it in the public cloud. Whatever you do, think of your hybrid cloud strategy as a multi-year effort that will include everything from a set of private cloud services to support emerging internal development and deployment needs to a way to leverage public services in conjunction with your data center.

Article / Updated 06-09-2020

Many companies that have begun to move into the cloud don’t do a lot of planning. Executives in different business units began to use public cloud services out of frustration because of inefficiencies in the IT organization. Over time, the cloud has taken a front seat in the way the overall business is approaching their future of computing platforms. It is increasingly clear that it is no longer good practice to simply move ahead with cloud services without a plan. Without careful planning things will invariably go wrong. Here are some ideas about what you should do and what you should avoid as you begin your journey to the cloud. Do Plan for Cloud Native As your cloud strategy matures, you should begin to think about building services based on a cloud native architecture. One of the benefits of cloud native is that you are building services that are designed specifically to operate in the cloud. A key benefit of cloud native services are modular and are therefore built with microservices and packaged in containers. You will want to focus on a continuous development and deployment approach so that your applications and services are constantly evolving based on changing customer needs. Do Plan for Data Consistency and Manageability Ironically, one of the reasons companies look to cloud computing is to move away from the silos of data. In the highly distributed model of the cloud, data is stored across a wide variety of applications and services. There are many issues confronting businesses as they look for ways to manage data so that it can be effectively used to help the business understand results and plan for the future. Although many tools allow data to be integrated across silos, it is more difficult than it may appear. To be successful, it is important that there be a common catalog where data elements are defined and managed. It is important that the organization understands the nature of stored data — for example, can data be readily shared or are there restrictions based on privacy requirements? You also need to understand how the data can be used and who is allowed to access and change that data. You also have to consider where data needs to be located. For example, certain countries have rules that restrict where personal data can reside. When you need a fast response, you may want to place data near the source where queries are taking place. Security, governance, and manageability are top issues for managing data in the cloud. Do Decide and Plan for Cloud Services Public cloud services offer incredible ease of use and flexibility to add and subtract services as needs change. Increasingly, businesses are finding that they’re using more than one public cloud across the organization. For example, one set of developers may have standardized on a specific public cloud while another business unit may rely on a different platform. It is not uncommon for one company to use as many as five public clouds. In addition, these same businesses may be using hundreds of different SaaS applications. It can be difficult to keep track of all of the cloud services that are being used. It is therefore important to use tools that can discover what services are being used and by which departments. In some cases, you’ll be in a good position to negotiate advantageous financial terms with cloud providers. When selecting public clouds, it will be important to focus on those that are using standards such as Kubernetes, Istio, and Dockers so that you have a better chance of having some level of portability across cloud services. When you determine that you need private cloud services review the offerings that use the same standards as those available on the public cloud. Consistency will make planning and execution much easier in the long term. Do Have a Service Management Plan As the hybrid cloud that consists of many different services in many different deployment models, you need to prepare for multicloud and hybrid cloud management. You do need to start thinking about all your public cloud services, platform services, SaaS applications, private clouds, and data center services and applications as a unified computing environment. There are many different levels of management that you need to consider and plan for. Do decide what is practical to do right away and what you’ll do over time as technology matures. Initially, for example, you need to be able to monitor each service that you use for performance and security. Test new service management products and services as they become available so you’re ready when these services are mature enough to support your long-term plan. Begin evaluating management platforms that provide you with visibility across your entire computing environment. In the long run, you’ll want to understand performance across all services as though they were one computer. The bottom line is that you want to demonstrate to your internal customers, external customers and partners that you can provide them with a well-managed computing experience. Do Plan for Portability Many companies that are using SaaS don’t make plans for the future, including what happens if their SaaS vendor goes out of business or becomes too expensive. Another issue to consider for the future is what you’ll do if you discover a different SaaS vendor who is better able to meet your needs. You do need a plan for how you can move your data from one cloud environment to another. Make sure that your selected vendors provide a simple and inexpensive way to move your data. You don’t want to be surprised. With the advent of microservices and containers, it’s becoming more likely that you’ll be able to focus on portability. It may not be as easy as you would like, but it’s an important practice to get ready for the future. Do Plan for Security Security can’t be ignored in a cloud environment. In fact, fear of security breaches is one of the primary reasons that management is hesitant to move key services to the cloud. Security is more than simply putting workloads behind the firewall. Organizations have to make sure that they have security across all their assets across all the cloud services they’re using. One of the biggest risks is to make sure that sensitive data is protected through encryption techniques. Do make sure that you have a well-constructed plan to protect your data no matter where it lives. Do Execute on an Overall Hybrid Cloud Plan When you’re creating a cloud strategy, it’s important to think about an overall plan for the services that will live across the public and private clouds and the data center. Many cloud services will be shared by developers in your company and with contractors. These same services may become product offerings that you provide to partners and customers. It’s therefore important that services are well tested, monitored, and catalogued. At the same time, you have to know what your company’s IT assets are so that you can create a hybrid environment that’s accurate and efficient. Unless you control the quality of your overall environment, your company will be at risk. If you’re using a public cloud or a SaaS application, does your management care whether your application and data reside in a multi-tenant environment? In most cases, multitenant is a secure and well-managed environment. However, you may have circumstances where your management team wants to isolate your company’s intellectual property from those belonging to other businesses. While it may not be technically necessary, it may be a governance requirement demanded by the business. Don’t Rely on Only a Single Vendor It’s tempting to find a cloud vendor you like and stop. However, that can be a mistake. Do plan to work with more than one cloud vendor so that you’re not stuck if something happens. Anything can happen. A vendor can have a catastrophic failure and be out of commission for a few hours or a few days. For example, if you’re developing and deploying an important application, you may want to have it replicated in several regions or on several different clouds. You won’t understand these distinctions until you have some experience with cloud computing. This is especially important when you’re working in a hybrid cloud environment. You may find that certain cloud services require the capabilities of a high-performance network. Other services may not require this type of sophisticated performance. You need to plan for all the different requirements. Don’t Over Invest in Licenses Many cloud vendors create packages to make it attractive for their customers to buy in bulk. So, it’s tempting to buy more licenses for more years because of price. However, this can be a trap if you over-buy. For example, a vendor might offer you half the list price per user per month if you sign up for 100 users over three years. The price is so attractive that you take the plunge, only to discover that you really are supporting only 25 users. No vendor is going to let you scale down those licenses once you have signed your contract. At the same time, keep track of the tools you use to enhance your SaaS applications. Are these tools provided by independent vendors with well-defined APIs? Are the tools proprietary to that application? You need to determine which approach is going to service you best in the long term. Don’t Overlook the Need to Manage Infrastructure One of the reasons companies are attracted to the cloud is that they don’t have to worry about the details of managing software and infrastructure. However, don’t be fooled. Even if you’re using only a couple of public cloud services, you need to keep track of the performance of these vendors. If you’re using a customer relationship management SaaS platform and it’s unavailable for a couple of days, who is to blame? It’s quite likely that the sales and marketing team will blame the IT department, not the vendor. Increasingly, IT will have to provide performance, governance, and security oversight of cloud services. Don’t Leave Your Data Center Alone It might be a relief to use cloud services to get around some of the inconsistencies and complexities of the existing data center. However, it’s dangerous to assume that the data center should wither and die. The data center will remain viable for many years to come. However, you need to continue to transform it so that it can work in collaboration with cloud services. So, don’t leave your data center in the dark. Begin to plan a strategy to optimize the data center so that it handles the applications and tasks it’s best suited for. Don’t Ignore the Service Level Agreement All public cloud vendors, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS providers, will offer some sort of service level agreement that explains what obligation the vendor assumes and what risks you have to assume. No vendor will take on obligations it doesn’t have to. So, it’s up to you to read the fine print and understand exactly what reality looks like. For example, no cloud vendor will reimburse you if you lose business because the service is not operational. They may indeed give you the money back that you spent on a service, but that will be small comfort if you’ve lost an important customer. So, you must decide how much risk is acceptable. This information will help you determine which services can reside with a commodity cloud service provider, which ones need to be with a provider that offers a higher level of service, and which services should remain in your private cloud. Do Move Forward and Don’t Look Back We think that the movement to the cloud is inevitable. However, it’s not a strategy that you should adopt without careful planning. You must deal with issues in the cloud that are very different than those you encounter in a traditional data center. Software license models are different. Vendors take some responsibility for protecting your data and the performance of your services. However, the responsibility will land with your own company. Therefore, you need to move forward armed with the right information and with the right level of caution. However, if you take the right steps, we think that the future can be quite exciting.

Article / Updated 06-09-2020

SaaS applications rarely operate completely independently. Companies often have an IT landscape that looks something like this: SaaS for CRM, a second SaaS for human resources, in-house analytics hardware behind a firewall, and AI for testing. Much of this information is fed into their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that may be housed in their data center. Providing processes that allow information to securely flow among these systems is critical. The figure illustrates this hybrid SaaS environment. The environment described here truly is a hybrid cloud, and it is probably a multicloud environment as well. It’s a hybrid cloud because the SaaS applications are in a public cloud while the analytics are on-premises. It may also be a multicloud because the SaaS applications may be in different public clouds. These applications ultimately need to work together to provide full business value. Of course, a hybrid or multicloud environment can be simpler or more complex than the one illustrated in the figure. Where do SaaS applications run? A SaaS vendor might run its software in the physical data centers it operates. Salesforce.com did this originally out of necessity because it was an early innovator without other options. Other vendors — for example, SugarCRM — run their SaaS offerings in public clouds, such as Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Platform. A SaaS running in a vendor’s data center isn’t necessarily more stable, but great software on an unreliable third-party platform is useless. So, it’s important to understand service level agreements (SLAs). The ability of a SaaS application to run in different environments is important for many reasons, just as it is for almost any other application. Consider these examples: Physical location may make a difference. Some SaaS applications need to be close to their users. For example, a high-speed video streaming server will provide a better user experience if the data does not have to travel long distances. In addition, some businesses have governance rules that require that their data be located in the country where the company is based. Software location may make a difference. When SaaS applications interact with other applications, performance will benefit if they’re both in the same cloud. This may not be necessary for simple interactions, but as data quantity and communication rates increase, it becomes more important. This is one of the reasons you may find the same SaaS application in different public clouds. Flexibility may make a difference. Not all clouds are equal, and all clouds are constantly making changes to their offerings and prices. SaaS vendors should stay aware of each cloud environment and be ready to move their applications to the cloud (or clouds) that provide the best platform for their applications. SaaS applications live in diverse environments, integrated with many services and other applications. Although this setup increases complexity, it also provides new opportunities. So, when a division of your company wants access to all of an application’s data so that it can run analytics, it is no longer reasonable to say, “Sorry, that’s in the SaaS application.” Instead, you can now replicate the data onto your private cloud where the analytics team can make a copy of the golden master (a single version of the truth for the data — the reference model) to run its sophisticated number crunching, and other groups, such as development, can make a copy of the data and use it for testing in a public cloud. Using SaaS as a cloud computing platform In order to create a more feature-rich application, some SaaS vendors have turned their application into a cloud computing platform upon which partners and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can build applications that extend the SaaS platform. This model represents an ecosystem that extends the functionality and value of the SaaS application. Typically, these ecosystems are domain-specific, for example addressing healthcare, CRM, or other business focuses. This is how it works: A SaaS vendor with thousands of paying customers opens its APIs to ISVs. These ISVs can then build applications on top of the SaaS vendor’s infrastructure. Therefore, they don’t need to write and deploy an entire application, but can focus on their specific extension of the SaaS platform. By building general domain functionality into the platform, the SaaS vendor attracts other vendors within that domain. Further, the SaaS vendor that created the platform typically takes care of messaging middleware, business process services, and other complex programming. Note: A SaaS platform is fundamentally a PaaS provider to the partners and ISVs who build applications in the SaaS ecosystem. When an application is built on the PaaS platform, there is no need to specify an operating system as would be required if the platform offered an IaaS service. By offering only the services that are consistent with the domain addressed by the SaaS. the SaaS vendor exercises control over the applications built on the platform, ensuring that they address the SaaS’s domain. Perhaps the most significant advantage to working in the ecosystem is that the SaaS vendor already has thousands of happy and paying customers. After a partner creates an application, it can market its software through the SaaS vendor’s portal in addition to using its own traditional sales force. This has become a standard model used by SaaS vendors to build their brand and power in the market. Who builds applications on SaaS platforms In this section, we take a closer look at the types of application developers that are suited to building their domain-specific applications on a SaaS platform. Partners and ISVs can be broken into two general categories: smaller startups and larger, established companies. It might be clear why a small company with limited resources might be motivated to build on top of, for example, the Salesforce.com platform, but if you’re a large player with your own customer base, why would you be part of another company’s ecosystem? Established companies may want to join another company’s online ecosystem for many reasons. Software vendors with successful on-premises applications are receiving pressure to offer a cloud version of their software. One challenge that these larger ISVs face is that in order to have a successful, enterprise-class application, they must create and establish their cloud presence. Joining an existing ecosystem that has already established their business and attracted customers shortcuts the path to customer awareness. Both large and small companies benefit by using the PaaS environment of the SaaS platform, which can dramatically decrease the amount of software that must be created to form a mature application, thereby increasing time-to-market. Consider Veeva Systems, a software vendor that has developed a cloud-based CRM solution for the pharmaceutical, animal health, and biotechnology industries. Veeva built its software in the Salesforce.com ecosystem. Without Salesforce.com, Veeva would have had to create a completely new platform from scratch — a monumental and expensive endeavor for a small company. Salesforce.com can’t meet the unique needs of every industry, so where Salesforce.com falls short, partners like Veeva step in. For example, pharmaceutical companies must comply with specific regulations. Veeva has built-in functionality to track and report the required information. Because Veeva controls software and process updates, when reporting requirements change, it updates the application so that all its users have access to the most up-to-date offering and are in compliance with government regulations and industry practices. One might think that building a SaaS application in another business’s ecosystem would devalue the application. However, the opposite is often more likely. You have no doubt noticed how food vendors at a mall are all located in the same area. Sometimes called the food court model, related businesses can do very well when co-located, not least because the customers attracted to the ecosystem are all highly qualified to do business with the vendors there. Developing on a SaaS vendor’s platform Clearly, there are great benefits for ISVs that build applications in an established ecosystem, but these independent development companies may be at the mercy of the SaaS vendor. The SaaS vendor develops and maintains the platform, and the ISVs who have built applications on the platform are then dependent on it operating predictably. If the SaaS vendor does an update, the platform may possibly change its behavior in a way that destabilizes the ISVs’ applications. Of course, stability and consistency over time is important for any platform, from cloud infrastructures to operating systems. But SaaS platforms are relatively new, and SaaS businesses may not have as much experience in maintaining them. To protect themselves, independent vendors should have the opportunity to thoroughly test their application on a newly modified platform before upgrades are released to end users. ISVs should research a SaaS vendor before developing on its platform to verify it provides the stability required to safeguard applications. However, in practice, the relationship between SaaS platform vendors and their ISV partners is symbiotic — each needs the other for success and growth. A SaaS platform should document its APIs and state how long they will be supported. The success of applications on a SaaS platform will benefit the SaaS vendor, just as failures will be attributed to the platform. Applications built on the SaaS platform will be branded with the creating company’s name, and they will, therefore, also be credited with the application’s success or criticized for failure. Examples of SaaS platforms Like so many things cloud, SaaS applications have reached a certain degree of maturity — marked by users taking new SaaS applications for granted rather than marveling over every new SaaS application. In the following sections, we explore a selection of the major types of SaaS applications. SaaS business applications From accounting software to customer relationship management, supply chain management, financial management, and human resources, there are SaaS applications for all the standard business practices. Not long ago, many of these functions were custom-created and run in on-premises data centers. Now, they’re in the cloud and generalized to make them suitable for the vast majority of businesses. These products tend to have several characteristics in common: They’re designed with business processes built in that customers can modify; they have published APIs so that third-party vendors and businesses can add functionality. These applications have moved in great numbers to the cloud because customers found the on-premises systems too hard to manage, and users need access to the application while on the go. SaaS collaborative applications SaaS is very popular for collaborative applications. This area is dominated by software that focuses on bringing people together — and most people are already in the cloud — to work together on shared activities. For example, web conferencing, document collaboration, project planning, instant messaging, and email and all collaborative applications. In a sense, it was inevitable that these platforms would move to the cloud. These tasks exist throughout the organization and need to be easily accessed from many locations. SaaS development services With more and more companies building software for the cloud, it’s not surprising that many companies are building services that make it easier to build applications. Services means online software that is intended to be a part of an application, not an application itself. Examples of development services include Monitoring as a service: SaaS applications usually work well, but even the best can run into problems. Issues can come from bugs in the SaaS, reactions to unanticipated situations, or problems outside the SaaS. In each of these cases, the SaaS vendor needs to quickly understand what is going on and remedy it. They’ll be lucky if they can fix the problem before customers start calling the support line. And if customers do call the support line, support personnel need to understand what the problem is so that they can help the customer work around the problem. Monitoring software examines many sources of information about the SaaS application and its operational context and delivers it to support, development, and other business units. Compliance as a service: Compliance responsibilities are time-consuming and complicated tasks that large companies must perform. Because compliance is a well-defined activity, yet very involved with many special cases, many companies have implemented compliance solutions as a service so the SaaS company doesn’t have to. Security as a service: Almost without exception, vendors providing antivirus software are offering their products as a service. However, security extends much further than looking for viruses in communications. Increasingly, security is an activity that is part and parcel of software development and must be designed into software as it is being designed and built. Database (and other components) as a service: Every application works with data and needs to store it, and databases (in this context, DBaaS, or Database as a Service) are the standard tool for storage and management of data. Every cloud environment offers many types and vendors of databases. Typically, it takes only a short time, perhaps minutes, to provision and launch a database and start using it. Other components used to build SaaS applications are also available for use in the cloud, including identity management, credit card processing, analytics, big data storage and analysis, and so on.

Article / Updated 06-09-2020

The cloud is the most disruptive computing revolution of our times; fostering dramatic changes in both the technology we live with every day and the way we use technology to transform business practices. As organizations are forced to deal with more innovative competitors, it is imperative that management can implement change fast. Cloud computing has become the engine of adaptive change. Explore how IT organizations can harness cloud services to simply and streamline operations and transform them for business disruption. We also discuss how businesses can re-think their business models to not only keep up, but to find and capitalize on new opportunities. Understanding IT Transformation With the rise of commercial cloud computing vendors and services, the role of IT is changing dramatically. While the IT organization in the past had total control of computing resources, now IT is tasked with providing oversight, management, and vetting of options. IT must be able provide the business with ways to integrate process and data across silos. The security organization is also responsible for ensuring security and compliance. IT now has to provide oversight and management of both cloud and on premises computing services. This means that IT needs to provide a transition plan for applications that no longer have the modularity to support business requirements. IT operations has to ensure that performance in a hybrid and multicloud world is consistent and predictable. Unfortunately for many companies, their IT organizations were busy maintaining legacy applications in a data center that wasn’t even ready for virtualization technology. It’s hard to believe now, but two decades ago IT organizations spent up to 80 percent of their time just keeping workloads up and running in their data centers. Business leaders began losing patience with the slow pace of the IT organization to support new innovative initiatives. Some companies have invested in emerging cloud technologies and app modernization offerings that help them transform aging applications. The successful organizations are on a path toward transformation led by cloud and cloud services. Escaping the IT Legacy Trap Ironically, legacy applications are often core to managing core business processes, such as payment services and customer management. But the architectural foundation of these applications means that they’re unable to be easily updated as business processes change. The applications themselves may be monolithic, complete with dependencies on other applications within the computing environment. Assuming that these applications can simply be lifted into a cloud platform is tempting. In reality, this approach is one of the most expensive and least productive ways of gaining productivity. First, not only does the application itself need to be moved, but also all the related dependent applications. In addition, these applications were not efficiently developed because of the technical constraints of an older computing model. Moving these applications to the cloud will require a massive amount of compute and storage resources that will be expensive. Equally problematic is that you gain no strategic advantage of having these out-of-date applications live in the cloud. The code can’t be easily modified to meet new business demands. What is the solution? The applications have to be transformed and modernized, which means that dependencies are removed from the applications. The application is redesigned as a set of modular services. When possible, frequently used services are written once and reused. The bottom line is that it is imperative that these legacy applications are updated and modernized to gain the innovation benefits of the cloud. Preparing for the Cloud While focusing on the technical underpinnings of adopting a cloud strategy is necessary, you need to take a step back. Your journey needs to begin with the cultural changes that you’ll have to embrace. While developers and business leaders may be excited about rushing to adopt cloud services from their favorite vendor, the IT organization may be resistant to change. Many organizations begin to use cloud services without a plan. For example, team leaders may want to rush to adopt cloud services without understanding the requirements for protecting sensitive data for compliance and security. This is asking for trouble. You have to make sure that everyone is educated about what the cloud can and can’t do. Everyone should understand how the cloud would play a pivotal role in redefining the pace of business. It should be clear to everyone that adopting the cloud for the business is a team sport and requires that IT and business units collaborate. It also means that there needs to be a balance between total freedom to use whatever cloud or cloud services that seems useful and the need for management of computing. The more that everyone understands about responsibility and goals for the cloud, the more successful the company will be. Have a well-established set of guidelines that are agreed upon and well understood. The adoption of cloud as a strategy and plan calls for new practices, skills, and roles. How do you go about modernizing existing applications? Are there Software as a Service (SaaS) applications that live in the cloud that are a better fit for the way business is being conducted today? If a SaaS application is the answer, you need to determine how and where it will be used. There may be a need for adding new business processes for that SaaS application. If enough departments are all using the same SaaS application, you should consider working with the selected vendor to create a licensing agreement that is beneficial to the business. When building software is in the business interest of a company, the relatively new methodology and practice of DevOps (development combined with operations) is well suited to the cloud. DevOps and the agile approach for defining and developing software is a practice that may be new to your business. Most parts of a company will be affected by a move to the cloud and will also have to make adjustments in roles and skills. This degree of cultural change can be difficult to implement, and it will take time before staff are used to the new cloud ways of doing things. We recommend pilot projects, bringing in training from industry experts, and hiring people experienced with the cloud to take on important leadership roles. After all that preparation, you’ll be ready to deploy cloud technologies, in either a private, hybrid, public, or multicloud context. You will still learn more as you go and will have to make adjustments to your processes. Your staff will have an opportunity to upgrade their skills, which can lead to new opportunities. But if you’ve done a good job in cleaning up your legacy data center and creating a new cloud culture, your path forward will have a much better chance of success. Ultimately, what you have done is to create a new business agility and flexibility based on new practices and effective use of cloud technologies. Building for Innovation The cloud makes building connections between your employees, business partners, and customers easier. Innovative companies can no longer live with strict boundaries among business units, subsidiaries, partners, suppliers, and customers. These relationships are key to your company’s success, and building better communications, feedback mechanisms, and transparency will benefit everyone. For example, supply chains benefit when both producers and consumers increase the transparency of their inventories, business plans, and customer needs. As IT transforms itself to help guide the cloud strategy, the organization can become an agent of change. With the use of well-defined cloud services supported by standard Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), it is possible to more quickly establish new innovative applications and services to support partners and suppliers. With the use of either public or private cloud services, a business can pilot new services with selected partners and iterate based on feedback. The ability to build quickly, test, change, and execute is the best way to experiment with new business models without requiring a massive capital investment. As you move forward with connecting your ecosystem together more tightly, you’ll find an increasing need to manage the myriad data sources your company and others maintain as though they were a single pool of information. It’s a complex task that requires careful business and architectural planning. When these application, process, and data services are freed from their traditional constraints, the business benefits will be compelling. In the previous generation of computing infrastructure, a business would have to create complex integration software to enable the ability to link customers and partners into the same set of services. This environment could take an enormous amount of time to architect and design. With the advent of the cloud, you can now create an environment where common APIs and cloud services can link an ecosystem together efficiently without having to build a separate computing environment. With the advent of agreed-upon cloud infrastructure standards, an ecosystem can be established more quickly so that a business can transform business practices to increase revenue and satisfaction. The Business Imperatives There was a time when a business could design a set of applications and computing platform that could stand the test of time. The environment could take years to develop and could be in place for a decade or more. Clearly, the competitive environment has changed, driven primarily from advances in cloud services. No longer does an emerging business have to spend millions of dollars on designing software and services from scratch. Now, a new company with an innovative idea can leverage inexpensive cloud services and build a new service; test it out with early adopters; and take over an established market, as shown in the following figure. The advantage of these upstart companies is that they have no legacy, no installed base to protect, and can afford to take risks with new business models in the hope of up-ending an established and lucrative market. In that sense, bringing your IT organization up-to-date is table stakes — something that just must be done. The deeper advantage of modernizing IT comes from putting innovative concepts into action before an unknown competitor has a chance to lure your customers away. By establishing a well-defined cloud strategy that is a collaboration between key constituents across your business, you will be in a good position to get started. You can begin the process of streamlining your IT organization by modernizing critical business applications and moving key workloads to the cloud. You’ll be able to make well-informed decisions about which workloads should remain on premises and which services should reside in the cloud. Management as a team will decide which cloud services meet the company guidelines for security, governance, and stability. While most businesses will support multiple clouds, you can set guidelines to limit the number of vendors your IT team will need to work with and manage. With this preparation, you have set the stage for being ready to innovate to protect the relationship with your customers and partners. Setting a cloud strategy plan into action will help create an advantage for your company. Optimizing Your Existing Business Before you rush to establish your cloud strategy, take a step back and think about how you interact with your customers. How do you reach your customers today? You’ll discover that most of your customers are already consuming cloud services in many different ways. These customers will expect that you’re using cloud services as a key business strategy. You want to be able to demonstrate that you can react to their needs for change without delay. Today’s customers expect your applications and services to be able to transform in near real time. If you can’t meet their expectations for rapid change, they’ll find providers that are more responsive to their needs. The bottom line is that without the agility of the cloud platform, you can’t quickly meet customer expectations. Take the example of a furniture business that has served its community for more than a century. The company has strong ties to the local community and understands the taste of customers in the region. But the market is changing. New cloud-based online furniture companies are springing up everywhere. They have no relationships in the community, and they have a variety of products from many different suppliers. They don’t have the solid reputation of the business that has been around for a long time. However, they have something that the established furniture business doesn’t have: a wide selection of products that are not back-ordered. A customer simply goes onto their commerce site and finds the precise item, purchases it, and waits for two days before it shipped for free. Can a physical furniture store hope to compete? There is no guarantee. However, a physical store can create a business model that is a hybrid between the physical store where a customer can see products they might want to buy, work with a designer, and create a trusting relationship. At the same time, the furniture company can create a companion cloud-based set of services where store-based offerings combined with third-party furniture and related items can be sold. Customers can order online and then come to the physical store to pick up items and potentially see them in the store after they’re ordered. In addition, the store can begin to collect data about which customers are most likely to purchase and how tastes are changing. Innovative ideas, such as having local artisans custom build furniture and accessories based on buying patterns, can transform a traditional furniture store into a competitive business. The furniture store has years of best practices experience that can be applied to the cloud model. With the cloud, the business can build out innovative services that leaders know are important to their customers and can experiment with new ideas that are managed in the cloud. Modern Development and Deployment Strategies How does an established business move to an innovative cloud strategy? How do applications get developed so that they’re innovative and ready to support a multicloud environment? DevOps — a combination of modern application development and deployment techniques — are the requirement for building cloud-based innovation. With DevOps, developers employ an agile development approach that assumes an iterative development process. The focus of DevOps and agile development is to focus on customer needs and metrics that can predict success. How do customers use the new software? Is it intuitive? Does it encourage customers to stay on the site and purchase additional merchandise? Is the application modular and flexible enough to adopt as customers react to the environment? Is it easy to partner with businesses that offer complementary offerings? What is the performance like once the software is deployed across different cloud platforms and within an on-premises environment? In its ideal state, DevOps streamlines development and deployment processes so products can be deployed at any time, not just when a new “release” has been created. For example, say that your business has a custom suit tailoring SaaS application that your customers use successfully. However, your customers tell you that they need a feature where they can send a proposed suit design to someone who will sign off on the design before it goes into production. Before DevOps, the feature would get bundled with other features and eventually included in a product release, which might take months before it was released to customers. But with DevOps operating in a continuous development and continuous deployment model, the feature could be developed, tested, and then deployed in days or even less time. The deployment organization would update the SaaS application, and customers will see the new feature right away. Your customers will love your responsiveness and will stop asking you when features they have requested will finally be released. Revisiting Your Business Model One of the benefits of the cloud is that it makes it easier to adapt your business model or to experiment with new ideas that could transform your business. In the past, businesses saw software services as a necessary part of their strategy but not a driver of growth. That has changed. You only have to analyze the success of companies like Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, and hundreds of other businesses that are challenging established businesses because of the cloud. In fact, the success of these types of companies is the fact that they have sophisticated cloud-based services where they can build and modify applications quickly and use data to understand customer expectations. The list of businesses with new business models is long and growing. The mindset in the software world is to find new ways to disrupt businesses—in other words, have a business model that is more compelling than what was previously used. So, if your business optimizes its data center, business relationships, and current business practices, you have probably increased your company’s success. However, you must realize that the more successful you are, the more other businesses are looking at your business and trying to find weaknesses in your business model that they can take advantage of. Therefore, you have a responsibility to your business to re-examine your business model, and possibly change it, on a regular basis. Transforming the Business Model Smart businesses aren’t afraid to break their business model and experiment with new approaches to satisfying customers. In fact, the cloud is also the perfect place to experiment with new ideas. All of this agility and flexibility can be applied to trying new things in the cloud. For example, it’s relatively easy to create a new website that takes a different approach, like packaging your product as a service so that customers can begin by selecting one service and then adding other options over time. With the flexibility of cloud services, you can test these ideas with a set of willing customers to see what offerings and approaches have the best potential for success. Business models are comprised of a set of characteristics of your business that can be adjusted to change how your company does business and how your customers and partners interact with you. Who are your partners today? What customers are you selling to today and can you expand your reach into new market segments? Is there a way to offer a subset of your products so that customers gain an appreciation of your offerings before they have to spend money? Offering compelling offerings that solve customer problems encourages them to buy once they get a taste of success. Being able to leverage the cloud to both offer and manage customer interaction transforms your ability to move quickly to increase your business. To make such a significant business model change can be hard to do, but it is worth it if it gives your business a new life. The cloud can help you by making it easy to experiment with your business model via the agility and flexibility. Instead of changing your business completely overnight, you can set up a subsidiary division or even stand-alone business, perhaps with a different name and brand. Treat it as a real business, but limit the number of customers or services to keep it less complicated, and see whether you get the traction you need. If you do, you can grow the new business at your own rate. On the other hand, if you don’t get the traction you need, you can close that experiment and try another until you find something that works for your business.

Article / Updated 06-09-2020

It’s important to understand the common elements required to make clouds functional. In this section, we give you the basics of what you need to know. The figure illustrates the related elements that come together to create clouds. On the bottom of the diagram is a set of resource pools that feed a set of cloud delivery services. On the top of the diagram are the common service elements needed to support these delivery models. So far, we have been talking about resources that represent infrastructure technology like processors, storage, and networking. But resources also include software services like databases, identity management, and email servers. Those software services are also available in cloud environments, and they are typically constructed as a shared, multitenant service. Multitenancy is a computing architecture that allows customers to share computing resources in the cloud. Although customers are sharing resources, their individual configurations and data are isolated. For example, say that you’re a cloud provider. If each customer had their own dedicated server, storage device, and networking equipment, scaling your cloud business to support thousands of customers would be hugely expensive. In addition, you’d have to offer your cloud services at a very high cost. On the other hand, if the cloud vendor uses a multitenancy architecture, they can have multiple customers using shared infrastructure. Similarly, cloud software vendors use a multitenancy architecture so that they don’t have to replicate their software for every single user. Your software data, settings, and preferences are all saved, but the underlying base software is shared in a multitenancy approach. To make resource pooling work, each pooled element needs to be written with service-oriented constructs in mind. Consequently, each resource is written as an independent service without dependencies and with well-defined interfaces. Cloud delivery models Understanding the foundations of cloud computing calls for an understanding of cloud delivery models. In this section, we focus on the models that represent computing environments: Infrastructure as a Service Platform as a Service Software as a Service Here, we cover the basics of the different cloud computing delivery models. These are illustrated as infrastructure services, platform services, and software services in the figure. Infrastructure as a Service Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the delivery of services, including an operating system, storage, networking, and various utility software elements, on a request basis. The easiest way to think of IaaS is that it provides a virtual server that is equivalent to a physical server — you have to select an operating system (for example, Linux, Windows, and so on), and everything “up the stack” to the applications that will run. IaaS has both public and private versions. In the public IaaS, the public cloud provider creates the infrastructure and resources that consumer can use. The user simply needs a credit card to acquire these resources. When that user stops paying, the resource may disappear. In a private IaaS service, it is usually the IT organization or an integrator who creates an infrastructure and resources that internal users and sometimes business partners can use on demand. Whereas criteria for a public cloud are based primarily on the ability to pay for a service, a private service applies company policy to a service request. Some customers will bring their own tools and software to create applications. Platform as a Service Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a mechanism for combining IaaS with an abstracted set of middleware services, software development, and deployment tools that allow the organization to have a consistent way to create and deploy applications on a cloud or on-premises environment. The easiest way to think about PaaS is that it’s an IaaS, but the operating system and development tools are already in place. Because a PaaS environment is ready for development, productivity and time to value is greatly increased. Many PaaS environments are anchored to software platforms. For example, Salesforce is a generalized Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to help companies manage their relationships and interactions with customers and prospective customers. Salesforce has a large PaaS platform so that partners with specific domain expertise can use the Salesforce PaaS platform to build industry specific CRMs specific industries, including pharmaceutical sales, education, retail clothing, and food sales. A PaaS offers a consistent set of programming and middleware services that ensure developers have a well-tested and well-integrated way to create applications in a cloud environment. A PaaS environment brings development and deployment together to create a more manageable way to build and deploy applications. A PaaS requires an Infrastructure service. Software as a Service Software as a Service (SaaS) is a business application created and hosted by a provider in a multitenant model. Some of the most popular SaaS applications include Google’s G Suite Apps, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Adobe Create Cloud, and Zendesk. Customers typically pay for the SaaS service per user on a monthly or yearly contract model. The SaaS application sits on top of both a Platform as a Service and foundational Infrastructure services. However, customers do not typically care about the underlying infrastructure and platform services. Instead, customers are concerned about the functionality, performance, and availability, and security of the applications. The computing resources lifecycle A fundamental notion of the cloud, both public and private, is that consumers utilize computing resources only when they want to and are only charged for the resources they actually use, for the time they use those resources. In that sense, they rent resources for time periods they desire. Contrast that with the physical data center where computers, storage, and other resources are purchased and then used for the life of those resources. To meet consumer needs, cloud service providers need to design their computing platforms to respond immediately to whatever consumers request. Since the providers don’t know when consumers will make their requests, how many resources they will need, the size of those resources, and how long they will keep those resources, the design must keep many resources available for use at all times. Moreover, the cloud provider must track all resource usage down to fractions of a second so that consumers can be billed for exactly what they used on a pay-as-you-go basis. When consumers finish using resources, the cloud platform must return those resources to the set of available resources so that other consumers can use them. In some situations, a service provider can’t anticipate the needs of a customer. Therefore, it is common for a service provider to add capacity from a third-party service provider. Typically, the consumer is unaware that they are dealing with an additional cloud service provider.

Article / Updated 03-27-2020

If you’ve spent any time in Azure Monitor, you’ve seen some of the myriad log files that your Azure resources create. Think of all the ways that data is represented in Microsoft Azure, and imagine a way to put all your logs in a single data lake and run queries against it seamlessly. Azure Log Analytics is a platform in which you do just that: aggregate VM and Azure resource log files into a single data lake (called a Log Analytics workspace) and then run queries against the data, using a Microsoft-created data access language called Kusto (pronounced KOO-stoh) Query Language (KQL). You’ll find that Log Analytics somehow normalizes all these different log streams into a tabular structure. You’ll also discover that KQL is similar to Structured Query Language (SQL), the data access language that is standard for relational databases. Creating a Log Analytics workspace The first order of business is to deploy a Log Analytics workspace. Then you can on-board as few or as many Azure resources to the workspace as you need. You can also deploy more than one Log Analytics workspace to keep your log data separate. To create a new Azure Log Analytics workspace, follow these steps: In the Azure portal, browse to the Log Analytics Workspaces blade, and click Add. The Log Analytics workspace blade appears. Complete the Log Analytics workspace blade. You'll need to provide the following details: Workspace name Subscription name Resource group name Location Pricing tier Click OK to create the workspace. Click OK to submit your deployment. Log Analytics has a free tier as well as several paid tiers. The biggest free tier limitations are Data ingestion limit of 5 GB per month 30-day data retention limit Connecting data sources to the Azure Log Analytics workspace With your workspace online, you’re ready to on-board Azure resources into said workspace. To connect Azure resources to the workspace, go back to Monitor Diagnostic settings, enable diagnostics, and point the log streams to your workspace. You can connect VMs to the workspace directly from the workspace’s Settings menu. Follow these steps: In your Log Analytics workspace settings menu, click Virtual Machines. You see a list of all VMs in the workspace’s region. You can see which VMs are connected to the workspace and which are not. If necessary, use the filter controls until you see the VM you want to connect. You can link a VM to only one workspace at a time. Below for example,the vm1 virtual machine is linked to another workspace. Select the desired VM, and click Connect. Behind the scenes, Azure deploys the Log Analytics agent (formerly called Microsoft Monitoring Agent) to the VM. Verify that the VM is connected to the workspace. You can see this information in your workspace settings. Or you can revisit your VM’s Extensions blade and verify that the MicrosoftMonitoringAgent extension is installed. You should know that Log Analytics can on-board on-premises VMs, particularly those managed by Systems Center Operations Manager, just as it can native cloud Linux and Windows Server VMs. You can disconnect a VM from its current workspace and connect it to another one. This operation is trivial, taking only two minutes or so to complete. To do this, simply select the VM from within the workspace and click Disconnect from the toolbar. Writing KQL queries You need to know a bit about how to access your Log Analytics workspace data with KQL. KQL is fast and easy to learn, and it should seem familiar to you if you’ve used Splunk Search Processing Language, SQL, PowerShell, or Bash shell. Touring the Log Search interface You can get to the Log Search interface by opening Monitor and selecting the Logs blade. Another way to get there (is to go to your Log Analytics workspace and click the Log setting. A third method is to use the Log Analytics Query Playground, where you can work with an enormous data set, getting to know Log Analytics before generating a meaningful data set. Follow these steps to run some sample KQL queries: Go to the Log Analytics portal demo. This site is authenticated, but don’t worry: You’re using Microsoft’s subscription, not your own. Expand some of the tables in the Schema list. There’s a lot in this list. Log Analytics normalizes all incoming data streams and projects them into a table-based structure. Expand the LogManagement category; then expand the Alert table, where you can use KQL to query Azure Monitor alerts. The t entries (shown under the expanded SecurityEvent item below) are properties that behave like columns in a relational database table. On the Log Search toolbar, click Query Explorer, expand the Favorites list, and run the query Security Events Count by Computer During the Last 12 Hours. This environment is a sandbox. Microsoft has not only on-boarded untold resources into this workspace but also written sample queries to let you kick the tires. In the results list, click Chart to switch from Table to Chart view. You can visualize your query results automatically with a single button click. Not every results set lends itself to graphical representation, but the capability is tremendous. Click Export, and save your query results (displayed columns only) to a CSV file. Note the link to Power BI, Microsoft’s cloud-based business intelligence/dashboard generation tool. Writing basic KQL queries For fun, let’s try an obstacle course of common KQL queries. Click the plus sign in the Log Search query interface to open a new tab — a multitab interface like those in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. To get a feel for a table, you can instruct Azure to display any number of rows in no particular order. To display 10 records from the SecurityEvent table, for example, use the following command: SecurityEvent | take 10 Did you notice that the query editor attempted to autocomplete your query as you typed? Take advantage of that convenience by pressing Tab when you see the appropriate autocomplete choice appear. Use the search keyword to perform a free-text query. The following query looks in the SecurityEvent table for any records that include the string "Cryptographic": search in (SecurityEvent) "Cryptographic" | take 20 When you press Enter, you’ll doubtless notice the pipe character (|). This character functions the same way here as it does in PowerShell or the bash shell. Output from one query segment is passed to the next segment via pipe — a powerful construct for sure. You can ramp up the complexity by finishing with filtering and sorting. The following code both filters on a condition and sorts the results in a descending manner based on time: SecurityEvent | where Level == 8 and EventID == 4672 | sort by TimeGenerated desc If you’re thinking, “Wow, these KQL queries act an awful lot like SQL!” you’re right on the money. Welcome to Log Analytics!

Article / Updated 03-27-2020

Ready to work with Microsoft Azure’s technology? Here, you learn how to deploy Linux and Windows VMs (virtual machines) from Azure Marketplace. Deploying a Linux VM It’s understandable that most Azure experts to get a kick out of the fact that Microsoft supports Linux natively in Azure. It was inconceivable up until a handful of years ago that we’d be able to run non-Windows VMs by using Microsoft technologies. Here, you learn how to deploy a simple Linux web server in a new virtual network, using an Ubuntu Linux 18.04 Long-Term Support (LTS) VM image from the Azure Marketplace. Deploying from the Azure portal Follow these steps to deploy a Linux VM in the Azure portal: Choose Favorites→Create a Resource, and choose Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS. Alternatively, you can browse to the Virtual Machines blade and click Add to deploy a new resource. If Ubuntu doesn’t show up in the Azure Marketplace list, type its name to find it in the VM template gallery. On the Create a Virtual Machine blade, complete the Basics tab. The following image shows the Create a Virtual Machine blade. Oh, boy, it’s tough not to feel overwhelmed when you see all the tabs: Basics, Disks, Networking, Management, Advanced, Tags, and Review + Create. Use the following information to complete the other fields: Virtual Machine Name: The name needs to be unique only within your resource group. Pay attention to the validation helpers that pop up when you place your cursor in a field. Availability Options: If you don’t see both Availability Zone and Availability Set in the drop-down menu, choose a different region. (East us 2 is a good choice.) Because this is a practice deployment, you can choose No Infrastructure Redundancy Required. Image: You specified the Ubuntu image in step 1, but if you’re curious about other options, open the drop-down menu to see the most popular VM images. You can also click Browse All Public and Private Images to view all templates in the Azure Marketplace. Size: For now, accept the Microsoft-recommended default VM size. Authentication Type: Linux VMs are different from Windows because you can use Secure Shell (SSH) key-based authentication or password-based authentication. For this exercise, choose password. You should choose a creative default administrator account name. ARM won’t let you use commonly guessed administrator account names such as root an, admin. Public Inbound Ports: For testing purposes, associate a public IP address with this VM, and connect to the instance via SSH. You’ll tighten network security group security later to prevent unauthorized access attempts by Internet-based bad actors. Select Inbound Ports: Choose SSH. Complete the Disks tab. This tab is where you make an initial choice about the VM’s OS and data disks. Choose Standard HDD to save money. The number of data disks you can create depends on your chosen VM instance size. You can always add data disks later, so for now, proceed to the next blade. Note that the default number of data disks Azure provides the new VM is zero; it’s up to you as administrator to decide whether you want to use them. Complete the Networking tab. You have some crucially important decisions to make in terms of where you want to place your VM and how you want to configure its connectivity. Here are the configuration options: Virtual Network: The template deploys a new virtual network by default. That’s what you want here, so leave this setting alone. If you place your VM on the wrong virtual network, you’ll need to redeploy it to move it, which is a pain, so try to make the right choice the first time around. Subnet: Leave this setting at its default. Public IP: Leave this setting at its default. You do in fact want a public IP address, at least initially. NIC Network Security Group: Select Basic. Public Inbound Ports: Allow Selected Ports. Select Inbound Ports: Select SSH. Accelerated Networking: Not all VM templates support this option. For VM templates that support this feature, accelerated networking gives the VMs a network speed boost by allowing the VM to use the Azure networking backbone more directly. Load Balancing: Select No. Complete the Management tab. Ensure that Boot Diagnostics is enabled and all other options are off. Boot Diagnostics is required to use the VM serial console, so it’s always a good idea to enable it sooner rather than later. Review the Advanced and Tags tabs. You don’t need any of these options right now, but they’re worth examining. Extensions allow you to inject agent software and/or management scripts into the VM. You can handle configuration after deployment, however. Taxonomic tags are a way to track resources across subscriptions for accounting purposes. Submit the deployment, and monitor progress. Click the Review + Create tab; then click Create after ARM informs you that your selections passed validation. If an error occurs, ARM places a red dot next to the configuration blade(s) where it detects invalid settings. Connecting to the VM Use Azure Cloud Shell to make an SSH connection to your VM. Follow these steps: In Azure portal, browse to the Overview blade of your newly created VM, and note the public IP address. You see a VM’s configuration below. Open Cloud Shell, and connect to your Linux VM by specifying your default administrator account name and the VM’s public IP address. To connect to a Linux VM at 13.68.104.88 using my tim admin account, you type: ssh [email protected] Type yes to accept the VM’s public key and then type your password to enter the SSH session. At this point, you’re working directly on the Linux VM. You can get help for any Linux command by typing man . Scroll through the help document with your arrow keys, and press Q to quit. Deploying a Windows Server VM Here, you learn how to create a Windows Server VM by using Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition and an ARM template. Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition is a free Visual Studio version that you can use for testing, development, and open-source projects. Microsoft does make a Visual Studio version for macOS. This procedure is especially important for you to understand for two reasons: ARM templates form a basis for administrative automation, development, and operations. You’ll use ARM templates to complete most tasks. Setting up your development environment Follow these high-level steps to get your Visual Studio environment set up: Download Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition, and run the installer. You need administrative permissions on your Windows 10 workstation to install the software. Choose the Azure workload. This step is the most important one. Visual Studio is an integrated development environment that supports multiple development languages and frameworks. For the purpose of deploying a Windows Server VM, you need to install the Microsoft Azure software development kits and tools. The image below illustrates the user interface. You can leave the Azure workload components set at their defaults. After installation, open Visual Studio, and log in to your Azure administrator account. When you start Visual Studio 2019, you’ll see a Get Started page. Click Continue Without Code; then open the Cloud Explorer extension by choosing View→Cloud Explorer. Authenticate to Azure Active Directory, and select the Azure subscription(s) you want to work with. Deploying the VM Assuming that you have Visual Studio open and you’re logged into your Azure subscription, you’re ready to rock. Here, you’re deploying a Windows Server VM from the Azure Quickstart Templates gallery. In this example, you use a template definition that includes Managed Disks. Follow these steps: In Visual Studio, choose File→New→Project. The Create a New Project dialog box opens. Search the Visual Studio template gallery for Azure Resource Group, select it, and click Next. Name and save your project. Choose a meaningful project name such as Simple Windows VM, choose your favorite directory location, and click Create. Select the 101-vm-with-standardssd-disk template in the Azure Quickstart Templates gallery and click OK. Here’s the interface. Double-click your azuredeploy.json template file. This action loads the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file into your code editor. Pay particular attention to the JSON Outline pane. Browse the ARM template’s contents. The three elements shown in JSON Outline view are parameters: You supply these values to the template at deployment time. Note the allowedValues element on lines 26–30; the template author prepopulated the VM disk types to make validation and deployment simpler. variables: These values represent fixed or dynamic data that is referenced internally within the template. resources: In this deployment, you create four resource types: virtual machine, virtual NIC, virtual network, and public IP address. In Solution Explorer, right-click the project and choose Validate from the shortcut menu. The Validate to Resource Group dialog box opens. Fill in the fields of the dialog box and then click Edit Parameters to supply parameter values. Visual Studio allows you to validate your template before deploying it to Azure. The resource group is the fundamental deployment unit in Azure. Therefore, your deployments must specify a new or existing resource group. Click Validate, and watch the Output window for status messages. Make sure to look behind your Visual Studio application; Azure spawns a PowerShell console session to prompt you to confirm the admin password. The feedback you’re looking for in the Output window is: Template is valid. If the template fails validation, Visual Studio is pretty good about telling you the template code line(s) on which it found an issue. You can debug and retry validation as many times you need to until the template passes. Deploy the VM by right-clicking the project in Solution Explorer and choosing Deploy from the shortcut menu. The shortcut menu contains a reference to your validation configuration. Monitor progress, and verify that the VM exists in the Azure portal. You’ll know that the deployment completed successfully when you see the following status line in the Output window: Successfully deployed template 'azuredeploy.json' to resource group 'your-resource-group'. Connecting to the VM You normally use Remote Desktop Protocol to manage Windows Servers remotely on-premises, and Azure is no different. Browse to your new VM’s Overview blade, and click Connect. The Remote Desktop Connection dialog box opens. You can download the .rdp connection file and open it from here. The steps to make an RDP connection are Click Connect from the Overview blade toolbar. Download the RDP connection file to your local computer. Open the connection using your preferred RDP client software. Microsoft makes a native Remote Desktop Protocol client for macOS; it’s available in the Mac App Store.