Episode 3 - Azure Migration Insights with Kevin Evans

Speaker 1: 0:08

Hello everyone, welcome to Microsoft Community Insight podcast, where we share insights and stories from community experts to stay up to date with Azure. I'm Nicholas and I will be your host today In this podcast. We will dive into Azure migration, but before we get started, I want to remind you to subscribe to our podcast on social media so you never miss an episode. It helps us to reach more amazing people like yourself. So today we have a special guest on this podcast called Kevin Evans. Can you start by introducing yourself, please?

Speaker 2: 0:43

Hey Nick, I love the intro. By the way, it sounded like a Navici or a Swedish house mafia track, right, I thought I was back in the clubs man, it was a really good intro.

Speaker 1: 0:54

Yeah, it was a brilliant intro.

Speaker 2: 0:55

Yeah, it was good man, it was good. But yeah, just give myself a quick introduction. My name is Kevin Evans. I'm a cloud solution architect. I work at Microsoft as well. I don't consider myself an expert, nick. I feel like I'm always learning everything every day, but I'm happy to be up to show.

Speaker 1: 1:15

No one is. The cloud is involved, so no one is involved. No one is an expert. So, before we get started, can you explain what is the cloud solution architect? Microsoft, what is what the role involved?

Speaker 2: 1:30

So cloud solution architects have a different meaning for different companies, right, so I see cloud solution architect role as something a bit more traditional. You know, we are platform engineers now, right, and platform engineering yeah, good stuff. But what I do is I help customers implement technical solutions right, so I validate architecture. We do like big sky thinking, that kind of thing. You know, I specialize in a couple of domains. I do infra infrastructure right, that's where I started. I also do cybersecurity as well, and I do cloud native as well, right, so nice mix there, right, and they all bleed into each other. But on a day-to-day basis, I help customers, you know, accelerate their journey into Azure or get the best out of Azure.

Speaker 1: 2:30

Okay, so you can say cloud solution architect similar to cloud innovate.

Speaker 2: 2:40

Cloud what's that again? Cloud advocate or yeah, advocate? Yeah, yeah, I advocate cloud technologies, right, but I also help design the architecture around that as well.

Speaker 1: 2:54

Okay, brilliant. So today's theme is Azure migration. We're gonna just quickly talk about that. So can you explain what Azure migration is and why it's important for the viewers?

Speaker 2: 3:08

So Azure migrate is a tool and an appliance, right, it's also a process. So if you're coming from a on-premises background and typically you would virtualize infrastructure as a service on-premise right. So virtual machines you'll be either using ESXi by VMware right, it's very popular Hyper-V or you'll have what we call bare metal right, typically database servers, that kind of thing, right, stuff that needs to raw horsepower, right? Or is it requires that dedicated access to the hardware and you need a process of typically getting those services, those workloads, into Azure, right? But you also need to know how much it's going to cost as well, right? And what the translation is from on-premise hardware and architecture to what it looks like in the cloud, right? Because it's completely two different things.

Speaker 2: 4:14

So a lot of people trip up on I'll just migrate what I've got, put it in Azure and it'll work, which is not the case. Which is not the case. You've got to do a lot of discovery, you've got to do a lot of prep work, you need to do a lot of dependency analysis. We talk about software bill of materials that includes operating systems and architecture. So, thinking about that, you need to know how much it's going to cost, quite frankly, if it's going to work. So I've come across some niche cases over my time, but the major hurdles are we're going to manage it. In a way, we managed it on premise One, that's inefficient and two, it might not work. So how many? Azure Migrate Alliance is going to help you Get you the data and the information. So, one, you can make technical decisions and two, you can feed that back to your leadership right in the stakeholders in your organization. And basically, how much is it going to cost?

Speaker 1: 5:25

And it's very crucial to have the discovery phrase in Azure Migration.

Speaker 2: 5:30

For sure. I think a lot of people skip over it, right, I always ask customers to take their time with it. There's always a rush to get that stage, but the longer you leave it, the better the data you're going to get. The way you deploy it on premise as well. I've done multiple scenarios over the years, agentless, with agents. So basically, you can download an OVA image I think it is from our website, get it deployed as an appliance virtually inside your environment, and as long as it connects to the vCenter or the Hyper-V I'm trying to remember what the Hyper-V version is called. I really should know this. But the virtual machine manager that you get for Hyper-V, as long as you can integrate with the WMI queries, you'll be able to pull that data back centrally, and then what you do is you log, ship those results back up to Azure, right. And then there's a nice tool built into the Azure portal. The great thing is you can break it up into projects, into sections. So a lot of customers like to start small, but when we think about it, crawl, walk and run with any piece of technology, especially if it's new. So I always say we have this canary face. Well, what servers should we look at to understand how the tool works. Let's set up discovery on that.

Speaker 2: 6:56

What the appliance actually does is one it checks the hardware that that virtual machine's running on how many CPUs, vcores, how much memory it's got storage. What we tend to find is a lot of on-premise servers that are overspec'd. So you buy your piece of tin HP, dell and normally it's overreact. There's more memory in there than it's required, there's more CPU than it's required, there's more storage than what's required, because you've purchased it right, so you use it, whereas with the cloud you can really right-size it and traditionally hardware isn't like for like. Hardware in the cloud is more modern and more efficient and we have more different hardware types, right.

Speaker 2: 7:53

If we look at Azure right from a virtual machine point of view. So what you'll find is you actually need less cores, less CPUs right, because it's newer hardware. Right, we swap that out constantly. Right, and that reduces your cost, makes it more efficient. The way it does that is it queries the WMI queries on the server, right, and it also speaks to the vCenter right, if you're using ASXI and it finds out where your peaks and troughs are. So you may have batch processes running a couple of times a month, right, but normally the CPUs are idling around 30 to 40%. Well, you can do things around that, right, and that's going to make it cheaper for you, I'm sure. But the one thing I really see go on. Sorry, nick, go.

Speaker 1: 8:43

Would you say that were one of the challenges that business faced when migrating to Azure?

Speaker 2: 8:50

There's that, right. And then there's they don't have the foundations in place In Azure ready to take these workloads on. So you've really got to educate them, right, because it's new and it's different. So when we think about how we used to build data centers on premise, we'd have networking, right, connectivity We'd have, we'd have external ISPs helping us, we'd have traditional firewalls deployed, we would manage those virtual machines with different sets of tools. And then it always comes back to landing zones.

Speaker 2: 9:30

Nick, I know we were trying to dodge the question, but it always comes back to landing zones, right, because it's really important that you get this right.

Speaker 2: 9:37

It's, you know, the way you are looking at it is if you've got the right foundations in place, whatever workloads you put in there, it's going to help you secure them and manage them right. I've seen customers that have massive system center environments on premise managing their on-prem and then I show them the automation tools that we've got in Azure or the update manager, right, and all of a sudden this massive operational overhead starts to get reduced. But things like security, you know, the stuff that we can do in the cloud is more capable than what we could ever have done on premise, right? So how do we protect our workloads right? How do we enable HA for our tier one workloads right? Our diamond apps? How do we build reliability right? And that's where the well-architected framework comes into place. So it's not just about migrating, it's also making sure you've got a safe place for those resources to land, because we want this to be a success, don't we? Regardless?

Speaker 1: 10:43

Yes, sure Would you count that you mentioned about some of the best practice for successful migration for clients.

Speaker 2: 10:55

Yeah. So we've got great documentation. It's very concise, which I like, but checking out the well-architected framework, understanding the process of how a migration works, getting the plumbing hooked up, I think Azure Migrate is a very good project. First projects for people to spin up an Azure. Once you've got your landing zone in place, you figure the whole lot out. You create an Azure Migrate project, you get to appliance on-prem You've already created a site-to-site connection from Azure to your on-premise environment and you start to get some artifacts that are deployed in Azure. So it gives you a good feel of what's going on and how the platform works, but really understanding exactly what you need. Running agent deployments I mean there is an agentless discovery mode for Azure Migrate, but I would say use agents. It is more work where you get better data and try and run the discovery for at least 30 days. So you get a full calendar month of the peaks and the troughs of the performance requirements for the workloads that you have on-premise.

Speaker 1: 12:18

Yeah, brilliant. So from your past experience, can you share some interesting or complex Azure migration that you worked on?

Speaker 2: 12:26

Yeah. So back in my partner days we had a scenario where we had I'm going to say it was a Red Hat Corum right. I don't know what it was running man it was. There was more smart people looking at this, but it was running in this custom cluster that had a IBM back-end right Running the cluster in the Corum that had difficulty running in Azure. It was very bespoke. I'd not come across many kind of architectures like that in my lifetime, in my experience, and we had difficulties migrating that I believe we managed to get around it when we got some specialist migration tools which were outside the Microsoft ecosystem right to help us with that. But you can't just come and bring everything and you can't bring a server. That's end-of-life. I once had a request from a customer to try and virtualize Windows NT in Azure. Now the folks that are listening and Nick's looking at me like what's Windows NT Right?

Speaker 1: 13:41

I'm a bit old Nick.

Speaker 2: 13:42

Yeah, I wasn't born that time. No, no, sorry. So Windows NT is the birth of most Windows operating systems we have today. Right, it came out in 1996, the version I saw when I was first in my career. It was before Windows 2000, and they asked me if I could virtualize that. Sure for them, I mean, it's never going to work, right. And I had another customer the same with Windows 2003, server 2008, and now 2012,. Right, I think most versions of that are end-of-life as well. Right, I see a lot of customers go oh no, what do we do? We've left it. We've left it. We've left it. Right, we'll put it in Azure.

Speaker 2: 14:36

It's Microsoft's problem, kind of, and it's like no shared responsibility model. So you need to again educate people on the shared responsibility model. And that's a great matrix because it shows you what you need to do as a customer and what Microsoft brings to the table as well. So Microsoft runs its data centers very well. It's obviously secure on that, but then the stuff that is you as the customer that needs to take responsibility for it as well. I have to educate a lot on that.

Speaker 2: 15:09

So some modernization work might need to take place, some remediation work might need to take place, but when you're talking about migrations, coming up with some low-hanging fruit, we're going to do some IT buzzwords. Here you get to understand the process of how to move something from on-premise to the cloud and then have it working for your customers or your users which the workload serves. It's also a great way of understanding your infantry. So what I mean by that is a lot of customers go. I didn't know we had that. What's that doing there? Well, it's just been running for years. We don't know what it does and no one uses it. Ok, well, we can get rid of that then. It's a great way of cleaning house as well. Ok, brilliant.

Speaker 1: 16:11

Just before we close up wrap up for the episode I would like to find out more about yourself. So are you going to any events? Are you planning on going to any in the future? Like community events? I might go to KubeCon this year, my first one.

Speaker 2: 16:26

I'm going to go to KubeHuddle, run by my good friend Marino in Toronto, but I'm also trying to. I've come up with a crazy idea to launch my own event out here in Western Canada for folks tech conference. I want people to come out here see the mountains, view the lakes, take in the atmosphere, wear a cowboy hat and yeah, it's kind of crazy. I just want to say that I'm going to be a part of the event. It's kind of crazy. I travel a lot for work, right, so it's difficult for me to go to some events, so I have to pick which ones I am, but I miss the European ones. I always see you, nick, you've got the most stamped passport ever everywhere. So, no, I really enjoy seeing that online as well. One of our folks have gone to an event, but yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:25

So, speaking of events and stuff, are you doing any community events, because I saw lately that you're being involved with quite a few community activities. Can you talk about that? So yeah, I have a YouTube channel.

Speaker 2: 17:39

Code to Cloud and I'm also part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and I run I lead sorry, the, the, the, the local chapters here in Calgary and Edmonton for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Meetups, right, so I do that like I think I do three every quarter. They're really great. The people I get through the door, especially people starting out in tech. It's some of the, the people from all different walks of life, and that's where I got the idea right For this skybound summit. Right, that I'm I'm putting together at the moment in the background is how do I do that? But make it bigger? Because I just want to teach as many, teach as many folks as possible and get them and get as many folks together that are very like-minded as well, right, so we can all have fun and learn some new tech. So, yeah, it's really big for me. It's. It's something that wasn't available to me when I started my tech career. So you know, just give them back, right.

Speaker 1: 18:51

Yeah, brilliant, it's all about giving back to community. So, before we wrap up on the episode, how can the audience get into it with yourself, and any last few words you'd like to tell the audience?

Speaker 2: 19:03

So you can find me on X, LinkedIn, YouTube. Linkedin is becoming the prominent platform for everyone. But, you can find me on there, but my words of advice are stay curious and do what you love, right, and I know it's difficult because we've got bills to pay, but try and work that into your daily routine, right? Do what you love.

Speaker 1: 19:29

That's brilliant. Yeah, so it's good to have you on. You're coming on this episode. Kevin Evans, I know you've been busy. We're trying to get you on, so in a few days we will have it on Spotify and music, so say to bye.

Speaker 2: 19:45

Bye for now. Music.