Spostare i propri workload su Azure può sembrare la strada più rapida per migliorare la disponibilità dei propri servizi e ridurne il costo, ma chi ha intrapreso questa scelta ha dovuto fronteggiare una realtà non sempre in linea con le aspettative. Eppure, cambiando le regole del gioco, è possibile raggiungere questi obiettivi. In questa sessione, frutto dell’esperienza di cinque anni di lavoro con workload in produzione su Azure, scopriremo come sia possibile raggiungere gli obiettivi di disponibilità ed economicità sfruttando tutti gli strumenti che Microsoft Azure mette a disposizione. By Daniele Grandini

1. CLOUD
CONFERENCE
ITALIA
2019

2. SPONSOR

3. MICROSOFT AZURE – WORKLOAD OPTIMIZATION
Daniele Grandini

4. WHO AM I?
Daniele Grandini
Technology Director
Progel spa
Daniele Grandini
daniele.grandini@progel.it
Twitter: @DanieleGrandini
MVP Cloud and Datacenter Management

5. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over
again, but expecting different results

6. ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?
DESIGNING THE «RIGHT» ARCHITECTURE
ON AZURE IS A MOVING TARGET
EVOLVING AND OPTIMIZING THE
ARCHITECTURE IS THE CHALLENGE WHILE
… KEEPING THE COSTS AS LOW AS
POSSIBILE

7. TOOLS AND PRACTICES TO OPTIMIZE YOUR ARCHITECTURE
«Optimize» what
Availability?
Security?
Costs?
Optimization is a journey, every
journey needs the proper vehicle
Azure Advisor

8. THE JOURNEY
Design
• Azure Cloud Adoption
Framework
Standardize
• Azure Blueprints
Audit and enforce
• Azure policies
Optimize
• Azure Advisor

9. MICROSOFT CLOUD ADOPTION FRAMEWORK FOR
AZURE
Ready
Azure Setup guide
First landing zone
Expand the blueprint
Best practice Validation
Plan
Digital estate
Initial organization alignment
Skills readiness plan
Cloud adoption plan
Adopt
Define strategy
Understand motivations
Business outcomes
Business justification
Prioritize project
Manage
Business commitments
operations baseline •
Ops maturity
Govern
Methodology • Benchmark
initial best practice •
Governance maturity
Migrate
• First workload migration
• Expanded scenarios
• Best practice validation
• Process improvements
Innovate
• Innovation guide
• Expanded scenarios
• Best practice validation
• Process improvements

10. AZURE BLUEPRINTS
Centralize environment
creation through templates
Add resources, policies and
role access controls
Track blueprint updates
through versioning
Streamline
environment creation
Empower developers to create
fully governed environments
through self-service
Create multiple dev-ready
environments and subscriptions
from a centralize location
Leverage the integration with
Azure Policy on the DevOps
lifecycle
Enable compliant
development
Ensure foundational resources
cannot be changed by
subscription owners
Manage locks through a
centralize location
Update locked resource
through blueprint definition
updates
Lock foundational
resources

11. AZURE POLICY
Remediate existing resources at
scale
Automatic remediation resources
at deployment time
Trigger alerts when a resource is
out of compliance
Remediate & automate
Turn on built-in policies or build
custom ones for all resource
types
Real-time policy evaluation
and enforcement
Periodic & on-demand
compliance evaluation
Policy integration for AKS
Enforcement & compliance
Apply policies to a Management
Group with control across your
entire organization
Apply multiple policies and &
aggregate policy states with
policy initiatives
Exclusion Scope
Policy as Code with Azure
DevOps
Apply policies at scale

12. AZURE ADVISOR

13. AZURE ADVISOR
YOUR FREE, PERSONALIZED GUIDE TO AZURE BEST PRACTICES
 Best practices to set up and optimize your Azure workloads
 Simple, step-by-step guidance and quick links
 One place to review and act on recommendations across Azure
 Alerts to notify you about new recommendations
Cost
Maximize the
return
on your Azure
investment
Security
Protect your
Azure resources
from security
threats
Performance
Boost speed and
responsiveness of
your resources
High availability
Increase uptime
of your business-
critical apps
Operational
excellence
Process and
workflow
efficiency and
manageability

14. HOW ADVISOR WORKS
Azure
Advisor
Your Workloads Azure Services

15. 100+ BEST PRACTICE RECOMMENDATIONS AND COUNTING
Performance
Update table statistics on
your SQL Data Warehouse
table to increase query
performance
Add regions with traffic
to your Azure Cosmos
DB account
Security
Enable MFA on accounts
with subscription owner
permissions
Install monitoring
agent on virtual
machine scale sets
Cost
Resize or shutdown
underutilized
virtual machines
Reduce costs by
eliminating
unprovisioned
ExpressRoute circuits
High availability
Use Managed Disks to
improve data reliability
Enable VM Backup to
protect your virtual
machine data from
accidental deletion
Examples
Operational
excellence
Create Service Health
alerts to be notified
when Azure issues
affect you
Repair invalid log alert
rules

16. ADVISOR DEMO

17. ADVISOR REST
API
 Connect Advisor with your organization’s ticketing system
 Assign remediation work
 Set up an internal working dashboard your teams can review and
action
 Leverage Advisor’s recommendation data any way you choose
 Work best for larger organizations, since it scales well with the
size of your deployments

18. COST OPTIMIZATION WHEN MOVING TO AZURE

19. COMMON
PITFALLS
Restructure and re-deploy is the hard way and…
the best way to get the benefits of public cloud
computing keeping the costs to a minimum
Thus sometimes applications won’t collaborate
Lift and Shift is the easy way and…
the best way to spend a lot of money gaining few
benefits
Thus there are a few cases when speed is a
requirement where it is the way to go

20. REAL WORLD USE CASES
SCHEDULED JOBS
Lift and Shift - Move the VM to Azure
(2 Core, 7GB RAM, 128 GB disk)
Availability 99.9% (44’ monthly downtime)
Monthly cost 200€ (backup included)
Restructure and re-deploy – use
Automation or Azure Functions
Availability 99.9% (44’ monthly downtime) –
99.95% (22’) with Azure Functions
Monthly cost 73€ considering jobs running 24x7 –
95€ considering 5h/day with Azure Functions

21. REAL WORLD USE CASES
TWO TIER WEB APPLICATION WITH A SQL SERVER BACKEND WITH HA
Lift and Shift
2 x 2 Core, 4GB RAM, 128 GB disk Web Front
End 300€/month – 99.95% availability (22’)
2 x 4 Core, 14GB RAM, 256 GB disk SQL
Standard AO Backend 1280€/month -
99.95% availability (22’)
Restructure and re-
Azure App Services, S2 2 Core, 3,5 GB RAM
123€/month – 99.95% availability (22’)
Azure SQL Database 4vCore, 20 GB RAM
750€/month – 99.99% availability (4’)

22. DIFFERENT WAYS TO PAY FOR AZURE SERVICES
Types of workloads
Always running
Running at specific times
Bursting workloads
Batch workloads
Always running
Reserved Capacity
Hybrid benefit
Running at specific
Allocate/Deallocate logic
VMSS with Autoscaling
Break even based on resource
type

23. VMS TIER CAN BE CHANGED – IT’S THE CLOUD MY DEAR
Virtual Machines Purpose-Built
Memory
optimized
Entry level
GPU accelerated
Burstable
High Performance
Computing
General Purpose and
Confidential Computing
Storage
optimized
Compute
intensive

24. BURSTABLE VMS
Ideal for workloads that do not need full CPU perf continuously
- Web servers, Proof of concept, dev build env

25. • Provides auto scale-out and scale-in based on usage metrics
• Enables easy integration with Azure SLB or App Gateway
• Auto-O/S image update for guest images
• Support for cross-zone deployment (HA)
• Shared image gallery
VM SCALE SETS

26. EPHEMERAL OS DISKS
• OS disk data stored in local host machine and not “persisted” to
Azure Storage.
• Manage thousands of VMs at scale with Shared Image Gallery.
• Faster reimage of VMs and Scale set instances to the original boot state.
• Great for stateless services, Website applications, game server
hosting services, applications that use VMSS etc...​
• Free. I.e., no cost for OS disk.
• DSv1, DSv2, DSv3, Esv3, Fs, Fsv2, GS, M-series VMs
1K VM Windows Linux
OS Disk P10 P4
Storage Cost
per month
€18,29 €4,90
Total cost per
month
€18.290 €4.900
Total cost per
year
€219.480 €58.800

27. AZURE RESERVED INSTANCES
• Reserve virtual machines in advance for significant savings
• Select 1 or 3-year terms
Significant cost savings
up to 72% over pay-as-you-go
models
Flexibility to modify
reservations and simplicity
of purchase
Budget predictability
and prioritized compute
capacity
• RI discount is applied automatically to the number of running
virtual machines that match the reservation scope and attributes

28. AZURE RESERVED VM INSTANCES – WHAT’S NEW
• Make payments monthly​
• Self-service exchange and refund.
• Ability to automate renewals​
• Scope RIs to specific Resource Groups for additional control
• Enhanced usage data to assist with charge back, savings, and
utilization reporting​
• API for purchasing, along with PS and CLI.
• Beyond VMs: Databricks, App service, SQL Datawarehouse and more…

29. software
AZURE HYBRID BENEFIT

30. SO WHAT?
A FEW REAL WORLD CASES

31. REAL WORLD USE CASES – WINDOWS VM
D4 v3: 4 cores, 16 GB Always running
Payg 261€/month
1 year RI 207€/month
1 year RI + Hybrid Benefit
95€/month + 17.25€/month
Windows Server license =
112€/month
Running at specific times
300h/month or 10h/day means
105€/month
Break even 313h/month

32. REAL WORLD USE CASES – SQL SERVER VM
D4 v3: 4 cores, 16 GB RAM SQL
Server Standard
Always running
Payg 507€/month
1 year RI 453€/month
1 year RI + Hybrid Benefit OS and SQL
94€/month 17.25€/month Windows Server
license + 253€/month SQL Server License =
364€/month
Running at specific times
300h/month or 10h/day means 210€/month
Break even 520h/month

33. “The measure of intelligence is the ability to
change.”
― Albert Einstein

34. GRAZIE!