Tag: Azure Stack HCI

100 Days of Cloud – Day 99: Microsoft Build 2022

Its Day 99 of my 100 Days of Cloud journey and in todays post we’ll take a quick look at some of the announcements coming out of Microsoft Build.

Microsoft Build is an annual event that is primarily focused on the development side of the Microsoft ecosystem, however like all Microsoft events there are normally some really cool announcements around new technologies and updates to existing technologies.

I’m going to focus particularly on updates to the technologies that I’ve blogged about over the last 99 days! In effect, I’m providing some updates to the blog posts so that if you’ve followed me on the journey this far, you’ll get to here and have the latest news and features!

Azure Container Apps

Azure Container Apps is now Generally Available. This enables you to run microservices and containerized apps on a serverless platform.

Common uses of Azure Container Apps include:

  • Deploying API endpoints
  • Hosting background processing applications
  • Handling event-driven processing
  • Running microservices

Applications built on Azure Container Apps can dynamically scale based on the following characteristics:

  • HTTP traffic
  • Event-driven processing
  • CPU or memory load

We looked at Azure Container instances on Day 82. The key differences between the 2 are:

  • If you need to spin up multiple container (e.g. front end / backend / database), Azure Container Apps is a better choice as it comes with Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) and it will auto retry the requests and add some telemetry data.
  • If you just need long running jobs or you don’t need multiple containers to communicate with each other, you can go with Azure Container Instances.

You can check out the blog post announcement here, and the offical Microsoft Docs page here for more information.

Azure Cosmos DB

We looked at Azure Cosmos DB back on Day 64 and learned that it is a fully managed NoSQL database provides high availability, globally-distributed access to data with very low latency. There are a number of APIs to choose from that best meets the needs of your database requirements.

Some of the new featres announced for CosmosDB are:

  • Increased serverless capacity to 1 TB.
  • Shared throughput across database partitions.
  • Support for hierarchical partition keys.
  • An improved 30-day free trial experience, now generally available, and support for MongoDB data in the Azure Cosmos DB Linux desktop emulator.
  • A new, free, continuous backup and point-in-time restore capability enables seven-day data recovery and restoration from accidental deletes
  • Role-based access control support for Azure Cosmos DB API for MongoDB offers enhanced security.

You can find out more about the Cosmos DB enhancements here.

Azure Stack HCI

Its timely that we only looked at Azure Stack HCI on Day 95 and commented that your Azure Stack HCI Cluster can contain between 2 and 16 physical servers.

The new single node Azure Stack HCI, now generally available, fulfills the growing needs of customers in remote locations while maintaining the innovation of native integration with Azure Arc. It offers customers the flexibility to deploy the stack in smaller spaces and with less processing needs, optimizing resources while still delivering quality and consistency.

Additional benefits include:

  • Smaller Azure Stack HCI solutions for environments with physical space constraints or that do not require built-in resiliency, like retail stores and branch offices.
  • A smaller footprint to reduce hardware and operational costs.
  • The same scale applies, so you can start at 1 and scale up to 16 nodes if required.

You can find out more about the AZure Stack HCI announcement here.

Azure Migrate

On Day 18 we looked at Azure Migrate, which is an Azure technology which automates planning and migration of your on-premise servers from Hyper-V, VMware or Physical Server environments.

Enhancements to the service now streamline and simlify cloud migration and modernization:

  • Agentless discovery and grouping of dependent Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs) and physical servers to ensure all required components are identified and included during a move to Azure. This feature is generally available.
  • Azure SQL assessment improvements for better customer experience. Assessments now include recommendations for SQL Server on Azure VMs and support for Hyper-V VMs and physical stacks, along with already existing assessments for Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure SQL Database. This feature is in preview.
  • Pause and resume of migration function has been included to provide control over the migration window. This mechanism can be used to schedule migrations during off-peak periods. This feature is in preview.
  • Discovery, assessment and modernization of ASP.NET web apps to native Azure Application Service. Customers can discover and modernize an ASP.NET web app to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Application Service Container and discover Java apps running on Apache Tomcat.

Conclusion

So thats a quick rundown of the main updates from Microsoft Build. You can find information on all of the updates that were released here in the Microsoft Build Book of News, and its also not too late to register and watch some of the recorded and on-demand sessions from Microsoft Build by signing up here.

As with all Microsoft Conferences, there’s a CloudSkills Challenge and you have until June 21st to sign up and complete the modules from one of the 8 challenges are available. As always, you can earn a free certification exam pass if you complete the challenge! You can sign up here and the list of rules and exams eligible is here!

Hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!

100 Days of Cloud – Day 95: Azure Stack Edge, HCI and HUB

Its Day 95 of my 100 Days of Cloud journey and in todays post we’ll take a quick look at Azure Stack range of offerings, the differences between them and their capabilities.

Azure Stack HCI

I’m starting with Azure Stack HCI as its the one that going to be most familiar to anyone like me who’s coming from the on-premises Hyper-V and Failover Cluster world.

Azure Stack HCI is a hyperconvered infrastructure cluster solution that sits in your on-premises infrastructure. It hosts virtualized Windows and Linux workloads and their storage and networking in a hybrid environment that is registered with your Azure Tenant.

Azure Stack HCI has its own dedicated operating system, and you can run this on integrated systems from a Microsoft hardware partner with the Azure Stack HCI operating system pre-installed, or buy validated nodes from an approved manufacturer list and install the operating system yourself.

The Azure Stack HCI operating system contains built in Hyper-V, Storage Spaces Direct and Software-Defined Networking. This means the configuration is minimal and you are pretty much ready to go in getting your Clusters ready. A Azure Stack HCI Cluster can contain between 2 and 16 physical servers.

Image Credit – Microsoft

So its basically a traditional Hyper-V Failover Cluster with a new name, right? Wrong, its much more than that. Because it ships from Azure, the billing for your nodes and usage come as part of your Azure Subscription charges. You are also required to register your Azure Stack HCI cluster with Azure within 30 days of installation. This can be done by using Windows Admin Center or Azure PowerShell modules.

Why Azure Stack HCI?

There are lots of great reasons for choosing Azure Stack HCI:

  • Familiar tools and skillset for exsiting Hyper-V and server admins
  • Integration with existing tools such as Microsoft System Center, Active Directory, Group Policy, and PowerShell scripting.
  • Integration with majoriy of mainstream backup, security, and monitoring tools.
  • Wide range of vendor hardware choices allow customers to choose the vendor with the best service and support in their geography.
  • You get full integration with Azure Arc for managing your workloads centrally from Azure alongside other Azure services.

Use Cases

  • Branch office and edge – for branch office and edge workloads, you can minimize infrastructure costs by deploying two-node clusters with inexpensive witness options, such as Cloud Witness or a USB drive–based file share witness.
  • Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) – Azure Stack HCI clusters are well suited for large-scale VDI deployments with RDS or equivalent third-party offerings as the virtual desktop broker.
  • Highly performant SQL Server – Azure Stack HCI provides an additional layer of resiliency to highly available, mission-critical Always On availability groups-based deployments of SQL Server.
  • Trusted enterprise virtualization – Azure Stack HCI satisfies the trusted enterprise virtualization requirements through its built-in support for Virtualization-based Security (VBS).
  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) – You can leverage Azure Stack HCI to host container-based deployments, which increases workload density and resource usage efficiency.
  • Scale-out storage – Using Storage Spaces Direct results in significant cost reductions compared with competing offers based on storage area network (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS) technologies.
  • Disaster recovery for virtualized workloads- Stretched clustering provides automatic failover of virtualized workloads to a secondary site following a primary site failure. Synchronous replication ensures crash consistency of VM disks.
  • Data center consolidation and modernization – Refreshing and consolidating aging virtualization hosts with Azure Stack HCI can improve scalability and make your environment easier to manage and secure. It’s also an opportunity to retire legacy SAN storage to reduce footprint and total cost of ownership.
  • Run Azure services on-premises – Integration with Azure Arc allows you to run Azure services anywhere. This allows you to build consistent hybrid and multicloud application architectures by using Azure services that can run in Azure, on-premises, at the edge, or at other cloud providers.

Azure Stack Hub

Azure Stack Hub is similar to Azure stack HCI in that you install a cluster of between 4-16 physical servers from an approved Microsoft vendor hardware list in your on-premises environment. However, Azure Stack Hub is essentially an extension of the full Azure platform that brings the following services:

  • Azure VMs for Windows and Linux
  • Azure Web Apps and Functions
  • Azure Key Vault
  • Azure Resource Manager
  • Azure Marketplace
  • Containers
  • Admin tools (Plans, offers, RBAC, and so on)

All looks very familiar, but here’s where it gets interesting – Azure Stack Hub is used to provide Azure consistent services to an on-premises environment that is either connected to the internet (and Azure) or disconnected environments with no internet connectivity. When we look at the comparison below, we can see that while Azure Stack Hub contains all of the features offered by Azure Stack HCI, it also includes a full set of IaaS, PaaS and cloud platform admin tools:

Image Credit – Microsoft

The PaaS offering is optional because Azure Stack Hub isn’t operated by Microsoft, its operated by you when you deploy Azure Stack Hub in your environment. So lets say for example if you are a small MSP, you can use Azure Stack Hub to host a multi-tenant environment that services your own customers with a PaaS offering which abstracting away the underlying infrastructure and processes. These are some of the PaaS services you can offer:

  • App Service
  • SQL databases
  • MySQL databases
  • Service Fabric
  • Kubernetes Container Service
  • Ethereum Blockchain
  • Cloud Foundry

Azure Stack Edge

The last member of the family is Azure Stack Edge. This is a family of Azure -managed appliances and was originally a Data Box solution for importing data into Azure. It acted as a network storage gateway to performs high-speed transfers to Azure.

Now, Azure Stack Edge is used as a AI-enabled device that can be used on remote locations to enable data analytics and create machine learning models that can be integrated with Azure Machine Learning. The data all stays locally cached on the device in order for you to create and train your ML modelling before uploading the data to your Azure Subscription.

Image Credit – Neal Analytics

You can also use the full capabilities of VM and Containerized Compute workloads on these devices, and can run a maximum of 2 devices as a 2-node cluster with a Scale out file server option.

Conclusion

So thats a brief overview of the Azure Stack portfolio and some of the benefits it can bring to your on-premises and edge computing environments. You can find full details and documentation at the links below:

Hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!