Microsoft IT and the Road to Azure—Part 2

Article
02/18/2011

“For new applications, the world is your oyster. You really have the
flexibility to design the app the way you always wanted to.”

This is the second of a two-part interview with Mike Olsson, Senior Director in Microsoft IT. In Part 1 , we discuss how Microsoft IT went “all in,” what they learned along the way and how to decide which applications to migrate.

Steven Ramirez: What is the biggest challenge for developers when moving applications to the cloud?

Mike Olsson: The very biggest challenge to begin with was conceptual—what is it and how does it differ? In the Auction Tool scenario, that was the first hurdle. The architecture and the nature of what you’re doing is substantially different. The cloud is different from a server that I can touch and feel.

SR: And provisioning is different.

MO: Provisioning is different and the processes are different. How do we apply controls? Typically there are controls that are provided by the fact that you need to spend $100,000 on servers. Those controls go away. We need different controls in place.

In other areas, we’re using Visual Studio and .NET so, at the architecture and design level, it’s very different. But at the programmer level, it is substantially the same. So you can at least sit down and know that you’re dealing with tools that you understand and apply yourself to the architectural differences.

There are other differences. I can scale individual pieces of my application depending on demand. The user interface might need more processing power when my app is popular or at the end of the month and my backend jobs might need more processing power overnight. I can scale those independently, which means that there’s a tighter relationship between what the developer puts together and what the Operations guys have to control.

SR: What about training?

MO: Since April last year we have trained around fourteen hundred people in an organization of four thousand. The training for us has been absolutely critical. I think we are at a point now where a large group of people can write an Azure application. Our next step will be to get them to consistently write a good Azure application. The next level of training will depend on the processes and procedures that are put in place. Because we now need to think about how we do source control, how we do deployment, how we deal with permissions.

SR: What are some other challenges?

MO: One of the things that we’ve had to spend a little time on is, getting people to understand that there are no dev boxes in the corner. The environment is ubiquitous and the delineation between dev, test and production is not physical. That can be an interesting discussion. The flip side is, when you move from dev to test to production, you know that every single environment is absolutely identical. And for developers that’s a huge boon.

SR: How does using Azure affect the design of future applications in your opinion?

MO: Designing a new Azure application is much easier than moving an existing one. If you have the environment in mind—you’ve been trained on it—now you can design it with the scalability, the availability and with the bandwidth considerations. You can build a much better app.

SR: And those were the things we always wanted as developers, right? We always wanted the scale, the availability and the bandwidth. Now we’re in a place, it sounds like, where we can actually have those things.

MO: We can have it. Right now we are still thinking about new applications. We have examples of good design but they’re still relatively inside-the-box. I don’t think we’ve seen examples of what will happen when you get a smart developer who suddenly has infinite scalability and enormous flexibility in how he designs his application.

For new applications, the world is your oyster. You really have the flexibility to design the app the way you always wanted to.

SR: One of the things that IT is most concerned with—and has made huge investments in—is Security. Can you talk a little about what you’ve found in moving to the cloud?

MO: The first comment I’ll make is, from a physical security perspective, the folks who run the data centers know how to do that. The platform is secure.

Security is incredibly hard and best left to the professionals. We typically say to people in the class we run that, if you do it right, somewhere in the region of half your application should be dealing with security. The basic rule is, get the professionals involved and listen to them.

SR: And it sounds like this environment lends itself to security, right? In the past it was always, Well, I’ll write my app then we’ll put a layer of security on afterward. It sounds like with Azure, it’s security from the get-go.

MO: Yes. I think there is a perception that, It’s the cloud therefore it’s insecure. But it doesn’t have to be. As long as you go into this thinking about security first, the platform will be every bit as secure as what we have on-premises—maybe more so because it’s uniform, it’s patched, it’s monitored.

SR: In closing, what are three things that customers can do to get started?

MO: The first thing is, get to a definition of the cloud. Understand the Azure environment and what it can do—and it’s relatively easy to do. There’s a lot of information out there.

Second, do some simple segmentation of your application portfolio and understand where to start—the kind of segmentation we did. Business risk on one axis, technical complexity on the other.

And the third thing is, get your feet wet. It’s incredibly cheap and easy to start doing this. The barriers to entry are almost non-existent. And most of our customers already have the basic technical skills in place.

SR: Mike, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it.

MO: My pleasure.

Windows Azure Resources

· “Microsoft IT Developing Applications with Microsoft Azure“ video

· “Microsoft IT’s Lessons Learned: Moving Applications to the Cloud“ video

· “Introducing the Windows Azure Platform“ white paper

· “Windows Azure Security Overview“ white paper

· “Cloud Economics“ white paper

The opinions and views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily state or reflect those of Microsoft.