Decoding Azure Operations

Rahul Ambhore is an Azure Architect who comes with 13 years of total experience, with the last 8 years focused on hands-on experience with Azure DevOps and Architecting cloud solutions to help enterprises build, rehost, and re-architect solutions. He is highly experienced in building solutions on Azure with DevOps and has implemented FinOps culture across the organization from an early stage of cloud adoption to avoid any cloud waste. Apart from his profession, he is also interested in educating the Azure Community through various conferences. Rahul serves as an MCT for the last three-plus years.

Build, Re-host, and Re-architect solutions

Since the last decade everyone is moving to the cloud and just moving on the cloud is not a solution to add value to your business. You need to understand and find the real reason and architects will help you to add value to your business. When you decide on the framework of any application that you have on your on-prem or you’re building that application’s cloud-native, first try to understand the flow. Usually, what people think about is to understand what their current architecture is and then find out what is the relevant or draft architecture on the cloud. Once we have that in the picture then you get the other three FinOps DevOps, and CloudOps in place.

Azure Operation Cycle

When we work with the product engineering team, when they have issues with the current architecture, they want it to move to a cloud to leverage the speed and beat the market. We find out what are the challenges they are facing, and most probably, we will see that people are trying to decommission their on-premises data centers to remove the dependencies on the hardware. Maybe most of the companies are finding the hardware is at the end of its life, and they want to do more on the cloud, to just ensure that we are focusing on business logic instead of going on hardware-related stuff. Initially understand your requirement, and how the targeted architecture involves your developer team.

Get the pain point from them, analyze it, and then also work with your fin ops guys. Whenever we move to the cloud or build a solution on the cloud, the prime motive is to not just get the scale, but also how we can optimize that application for better business values. The people from your finance teams, get the forecasting work with your solution architect team from the issuer or your partners to understand the cost, and that way you can make value out of it.

Operational needs for people who are migrating to Azure

People who are moving from on-premises to Azure are doing lift and shift where they are re-hosting the application and re-architecting it. At the very initial stage, you also need to involve your product support team, SRE team, or whoever is your monitoring team or operation team. They understand what you’re up to, when you involve these guys at the production stage they may or may not have the cloud skills.

Anyone who has the plan to move to Cloud when they have the initial budget, and then they can involve all the stakeholders and have a discussion and let them know these are the new tools that we are planning to use. We may need resources to understand this, or we may need to upskill our resources on these tools. That way, when you are when y about to go live, you have everything in place, and people are supporting you to the fullest.