Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?
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Another thing to realize, how much bandwidth do you need from your servers to your users? They are used to gigabit I assume today (or better). You might have to get a dedicated connection between you and the DC, or likely at minimum a faster pipe at your office. food for thought.
way to go Scott!
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@scottalanmiller said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
Now in the real world, you likely have needs like big databases, file servers, and other workloads that don't play nicely with cloud. In the real world we see Windows servers almost never (except for jump boxes and domain controllers) running at the tiny 4GB/80GB sizes. It's normal to see them in the 8-32GB sizes which are $70-$240/mo.
So conservatively, you are looking at numbers much much bigger. Even on Vultr for 30 real world VMs, you are probably more like $3200/mo and on Azure more like $15,000/mo.
Your colocation cost would go up, too, but only the initial server for just 30 VMs. So while you'd need a bigger server, you get way, way more for your dollars spent there. Going up to a $12K-$15K server will easily get you 256GB of RAM and more storage. The bigger your needs, the faster colocation outpaces cloud costs. Your savings just go up and up.
Scott, it really depends on so many things.
Maybe they aren't simply looking to just move the VMs off-prem, or just move them to somewhere else, but to add some actual value to this conception. There could be a ton of motive behind this that was not mentioned in the OP. Maybe they are losing out to their competition due to lack of ability to keep up in some areas? Maybe now there's no regional redundancy, no backups, no load balancing.... are there huge databases?... are there really busy web apps that need accessed globally and actually could benefit from a AKS or EKS (for many reasons not mentioned, just saying)?... along with managed SQL services that Azure/AWS offer? Do they need application insights that they don't have now... event-driven automation, monitoring, etc? Maybe they don't even need VMs, but could change the entire company culture and mindset to build their app in a future forward way.... consumption based costs using app services, functions, databases, etc.... possibly may not need 30 VMs, but only a couple (that could live in Vultr for cheap).
Since Windows, assuming AD is involved...., and if everything (web apps, etc) is cloud native, maybe they need a AAD B2C model for their web app... who knows.
Maybe they have no web apps at all, and no need at all for those above mentioned cloud services. It could be it's all the standard Windows AD and associated services on a bunch of VMs, with a VM for phone, a VM for backups, a VM Nextcloud, etc.... Does it make sense to have your users using legacy lan-based apps suddenly connect to somewhere else, adding latency? Again, i mention what value does your proposal bring to the business.... again, do you want cloud, do you want to move your VMs somewhere else? Why?
Or even, maybe they can get rid of a bunch of VMs, and some of the serverless technologies can take care of the requirements for free... lots of serverless tech in Azure and AWS that you can use for free, at least for a lot of SMB needs.
It totally depends, you have to start out with some simple, but tough, questions to know what you can and can't rule out right off the bat.
Without writing a longer wall of text that I won't be able to keep up to responses with, just know there's 99.999% more to cloud (whether it be Azure, AWS, GCP) than you seem to be considering or keeping up with.
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@Obsolesce said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
Maybe now there's no regional redundancy, no backups, no load balancing.... are there huge databases?
Sure, we'll guess that there probably isn't. But cloud doesn't do that either. In both cases, you can have that redundancy, and in both cases, you don't be default, and in both cases, you can use cloud as the redundant option regardless of the starting location.
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@Obsolesce said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
Since Windows, assuming AD is involved...., and if everything (web apps, etc) is cloud native, maybe they need a AAD B2C model for their web app... who knows.
It is, he casually listed it as a DC.
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I feel there is more value moving from on-prem servers to SaaS than to IaaS. It's simply higher up the value chain.
Typical companies have infrastructure because they have to, not because it's their mission in life. It's the digital tools and advantages they are after.
So unless you are a provider yourself, why even bother with infrastructure if you don't have to? Let someone else have that problem.
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@Pete-S said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
I feel there is more value moving from on-prem servers to SaaS than to IaaS. It's simply higher up the value chain.
Typical companies have infrastructure because they have to, not because it's their mission in life. It's the digital tools and advantages they are after.
So unless you are a provider yourself, why even bother with infrastructure if you don't have to? Let someone else have that problem.
I cam here to say this exact same thing. You don't need to go full cloud and like @Pete-S said, I see PaaS as the low hanging fruit.
Migrating SQL to Azure or AWS as a PaaS makes sense because you don't have the maintain the SQL servers, and you can have quick instant backups to S3 or Blob storage.
It's very easy to scale SQL up and down on the cloud to find the right size.
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Consumption based pricing model on PaaS is great when utilized properly too. No matter the cloud provider. They are all competitive.
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@Pete-S said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
I feel there is more value moving from on-prem servers to SaaS than to IaaS.
Anything to SaaS is generally the best move
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Each stage is one step more managed and inclusive. Basically...
SaaS > PaaS > IaaS
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@scottalanmiller said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
Each stage is one step more managed and inclusive. Basically...
SaaS > PaaS > IaaS
Yes, but you cannot move everything to SaaS though. You will need to switch to PaaS in some cases like DBs or to help with your developer by using a PaaS tool like elastic beanstalk. That way if you have developers they don't worry much about infrastructure and are able to focus on dev.
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When most people thing cloud they think of the term Rehost. Which means you move existing resources to the cloud and don't change your design at all. In this case, you are basically doing a Colo and you are not really going cloud.
Replatforming is the most common and least interrupting way to move to the cloud. Let's say you have a typical application with Web, app, database servers, instead of migrating your entire app to the cloud, you use PaaS for your database and leverage cloudfront for static resources on your web app. You still keep your web and app servers on prem.
ReArchtecting is the best way to do things, but also the most time consuming and costly in short term. As @scottalanmiller mentioned windows is terrible for cloud servers. My company re architected app to work on Linux and leveraged cloud SaaS and PaaS into the application. The result in the long run is a less expensive, less maintenance, and elasticity.
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@IRJ said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
When most people thing cloud they think of the term Rehost. Which means you move existing resources to the cloud and don't change your design at all. In this case, you are basically doing a Colo and you are not really going cloud.
Right. Using cloud for something other than its purpose. It's really a cloud product, but not a cloud intent. Kind of like buying a car... but hitching it to your horse and still making the horse pull it as if it were a tradition carriage. Technically it's still a car, but not being used as intended.
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@IRJ said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
Let's say you have a typical application with Web, app, database servers,
That's not typical. As Jared would say, that's only typical in Scottworld - an ideal future world where people have adopted both modern and good methodologies. In the real world, companies use these kinds of workloads rarely. In many industries, not at all. They are well understood and increasingly we see them creeping into businesses, not still almost entirely as SaaS and not managed by internal IT.
Real world IT for normal companies still involved legacy and/or poorly designed architectures that don't have those components. Not because they have to, as people often claim, or because they should, but it is what they do. And not once in a while, but nearly always.
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@IRJ said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
As @scottalanmiller mentioned windows is terrible for cloud servers.
It's actually terrible for all servers. Cloud just takes what is bad about it and magnifies it to an absurd degree that makes it impossible to avoid.
Windows was designed with a "there is a surplus of hardware resources, so efficiency doesn't matter" attitude that was always foolish for performance, maintenance, and security. But they got away with it, more or less, in that they were able to sell it to management regardless. But now, instead of wasting a small portion of IT budgets, it can make IT budgets 400% what they would be otherwise and that's hard for even the most stubborn CFO to try to ignore.
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I can't count the number of people in the last 12 months that we've "de-clouded" after a CIO got in there and made the switch. With the exception of hosted Exchange / 365, almost every thing else had increased costs, more downtime, and worse user experience. With inexpensive hyperconverged systems, and good backup strategies, it's been a win by a factor of sometimes 1/10th the cost.
We use AWS / Azure quite a bit....but not for 50 people that need a file server. 2014 was the buzz year of "cloud", and 2019 was the buzz year of "maybe not"
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@dwright1542 said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
I can't count the number of people in the last 12 months that we've "de-clouded" after a CIO got in there and made the switch. With the exception of hosted Exchange / 365, almost every thing else had increased costs, more downtime, and worse user experience. With inexpensive hyperconverged systems, and good backup strategies, it's been a win by a factor of sometimes 1/10th the cost.
We've been lucky that mostly we've stopped people going cloud before they did it. We have one that did it and is happy, but is falsely comparing to a disastrous non-cloud implementation previously. They were already overpaying on nearly every device and ever service by 1,000% (real numbers.) So when they went cloud, they weren't comparing it against a good non-cloud option, they were comparing against a false, contrived situation that wasn't indicative of anything.
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@dwright1542 said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
With the exception of hosted Exchange / 365, almost every thing else had increased costs
We've had good luck moving off of that one, too. But mostly to just a better cloud product
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@dwright1542 said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
and 2019 was the buzz year of "maybe not"
LOL
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@dwright1542 said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
I can't count the number of people in the last 12 months that we've "de-clouded" after a CIO got in there and made the switch.
Any examples?
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I'm a dumb ass. I completely failed to mention that we have a completely on-prem setup for AD and Exchange and I'm hoping to eventually move to O365 and set up sync with Azure so users can remotely authenticate for all our SSO apps and things.. I'm mainly thinking more along those lines and wondering how to do that. Moving all our on-prem servers to a remote datacenter would be a completely separate project. I kinda just blobbed them all together in my post.
