Managing Microsoft Hybrid Clouds (2015)

Chapter 9. Summary and a Look into the Near Future

Congratulations! You made it to the last chapter of this book. I really hope you enjoyed reading the information and hope you learned from it. It would be great if it enables you to feel comfortable about using Microsoft Azure in your environment.

This book took you on a trip that started in the 18th century. We looked at the development of electrical power; the development of cloud computing could go the same direction. However, some major hurdles need to be overcome. The breakthrough for electricity as a utility was the discovery of alternate current. A hurdle for adoption of cloud computing in many countries is security of data. The Patriot Act and other US laws certainly make some organizations reserved about using the cloud. These issues are likely to be solved in the near future by technologies such as encryption or by adjustments of US laws. This industry is just starting on the journey of discovering the amazing possibilities of the cloud, and cost reductions and agility will surely convince many to start using cloud computing.

Then, we had a look at Microsoft Cloud OS, which is not a product but a vision of Microsoft to create a connected infrastructure using on-premises, Azure, and service provider resources that are managed as one big resource pool. Hybrid cloud is seen by many, including Gartner, as the next big thing. First, there was private cloud, and now hybrid cloud will start to march towards maturity.

As Azure is being developed, more and more features and services are being added. It started as a PaaS platform and now offers IaaS as well. However, remember that Azure offers a less rich feature set than on-premises Hyper-V. Microsoft still needs to make improvements in the availability of single instance virtual machines, clustering support, and remote console support.

As this book was printed at least a couple of weeks before you are reading this, it is likely that Azure has changed quite a bit. The challenge of writing a book on cloud computing is to keep it as current as possible for when it is going to be published.

This book explained how to create a virtual machine and how to connect Azure Virtual Networks to your on-premises environment. You also learned how to migrate from Hyper-V, VMware, and Amazon to Azure. You even looked at what is happening under the hood of Azure data centers.

The road ahead

Challenging and exciting times are ahead. I am sure what we see developing today is only the beginning. Microsoft is releasing new Azure features about once every three weeks. This is an incredible pace. Massive amounts of resources are spent on making sure the cloud is the next phase in IT. The shift has already started. Sales of servers manufactured by established vendors like IBM and HP are going down. Applications are offered on the Internet as Software as a Service and consumed by using a browser. Microsoft releases new features in its cloud-based software first before releasing them for on-premises solutions. Traditional fat desktops are swapped for thin, lightweight clients with just enough software to connect to the Internet and offer a browser and lightweight office tools.

Oracle and Citrix were amongst the first major software vendors supporting Azure. SAP joined later in 2014. Many more will follow soon.

How will Microsoft Azure develop in the next few years? What features and services will be making their way onto their roadmap? These are questions that are hard to answer, as nobody outside Microsoft really knows. A few guesses of features that are likely to come and are maybe even offered when you are reading this are as follows:

· Support for VHDX

· More granular access control for Azure Management Portal administrators

· Support for multiple IP addresses on a network interface

· Support for multiple 10 Gbps network interfaces

· Support for audit trails

· A limited or no downtime at all for single instance virtual machines during Microsoft maintenance

· A service-level agreement for single instance virtual machines

· Reduction of costs for storage and compute

· Many more new data centers

· Live migration from Hyper-V to Microsoft Azure

· Replication of VMware virtual machines and physical servers using Azure Site Recovery

· More features for billing

· Backup of virtual machine data stored in Azure

· Azure hosts with dedicated graphical cards to support high performance graphics applications for Desktop as a Service

· Support for Generation 2 VM's by Azure Site Recovery

If you would like to request a feature from Microsoft, you can use this forum: http://feedback.azure.com/forums/216843-virtual-machines.

Here you will find many requests of customers using Azure for new features. For the Virtual Machine service, the most requested feature at the moment is console access.

Many improvements are to be made on the storage level. In the near future, customers will probably be able to have a minimum guaranteed number of IOPS per disk or per virtual machine. This will make sure your application will perform as expected with controls at a more granular level.

Currently, backup storage is stored on either production storage or Azure Vault, which is much more expensive. It is likely that an offline tier such as Amazon Glacier will become available, which allows cheap archiving of data.

Software solutions that use Azure raw storage and turn this into software-based network attached storage with features such as on-premises NAS and SAN are another likely enhancement. SoftNAS is such an example currently available for Amazon.

Azure already supports serving applications by RemoteApp. The alliance with Citrix opened up many new avenues such as running XenDesktop and XenApp on Azure. Citrix Workspace Services is an interesting new concept enabling a central management console for apps and desktop publishing.

For disaster recovery, I expect some additional features to be added soon. Currently, when there is an issue with storage affecting virtual machine availability, customers have to wait for Microsoft to failover to the paired region. The decision to failover is difficult, as this will mean customers will lose data. Also, virtual machines will need to be recreated at the alternate region after a failover, which is unacceptable for larger deployments. I expect many improvements in regards to the protection of virtual machines.

Amazon Web Services is considered by Gartner as the leader in the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service. Amazon has many features at the moment and has much more compute and storage capacity. However, Amazon is lacking a hybrid cloud strategy. While Amazon is good for hosting greenfield, newly developed, and scalable cloud applications, it lacks features to connect on-premises applications to services running in the cloud. Microsoft has a big advantage in having many customers using Microsoft products in their on-premises environment. These Microsoft solutions are increasingly able to use Azure resources. We have to wait and see how this advantage pays off in the end.

While technically still a bit immature, there are more important possible showstoppers to adopt the cloud besides lack of features. Especially in Europe and South America, many organizations are not very willing to store data in clouds owned by US companies. There is a lot of fear that the NSA, FBI, or other US authorities might be looking at their data—not to search for evidence of threats to US safety, but more often to have a look at information that might be beneficial for the US economy or politics.

Microsoft and other cloud service providers are working hard to solve this major issue, at least for Europe. Encryption of all the data being transferred into the cloud is a possible solution that will, however, present some new challenges in data management. How will enterprises make sure encryption keys are available when required? If keys are lost, the data is lost as well. Microsoft will not be able to assist in recovery of encryption keys, nor the NSA (I assume).

To enable customers to dip their toes into cloud computing, Microsoft started Azure Site Recovery. Site Recovery allows Azure to be used as a replication target for on-premises Hyper-V environments. A customer owned second datacenter for disaster recovery reasons is not required anymore, offering large cost reductions as a result.

Another tool to make the transition to Azure easier is Azure Migration Accelerator.

Once customers are used to the benefits of the cloud by using Azure Site Recovery, it is expected they will slowly start to deploy virtual machines for test and development purposes. After all, the virtual machines are already stored in the cloud, so deploying production applications in the cloud will be the next logical step.

Third-party vendors will offer a number of solutions to enhance Azure. We will see the same as what happened to Hyper-V a few years ago. Initially, just a few vendors offered solutions that supported Hyper-V. Over the years, many vendors started supporting Hyper-V. Now, Hyper-V has a fast growing ecosystem of solutions.

Zerto, which offers disaster recovery software for vSphere infrastructures, now has software that is able to perform cross-hypervisor replication. So, a vSphere virtual machine can be replicated to a Hyper-V virtual machine. In the near future, it is likely that Zerto or other companies will support the same for replication to Microsoft Azure data centers.

Amazon already has a large ecosystem of such vendors.

Additional tools will benefit from enhanced APIs such as the ones Amazon already offers. Amazon has APIs that allow a detailed monitoring of health and capacity. Also, APIs for billing are very mature.

Currently, just a few appliances are supported to run on Azure. Kemp and Barracuda Networks are about the only vendors supporting Azure. Citrix will probably soon add Azure support to their NetScaler solutions as well as for App Controller.

There are many more possible enhancements to think of. The ones above are just some educated guesses of mine.

To keep abreast of the developments on Microsoft Azure, please check out my blog on http://up2v.nl or follow me on Twitter at @marcelvandenber.

Many thanks for taking the time to read this book. Hope you liked it!