Q&A

How to Improve the Cloud Journey to Azure

• By David Ramel
• 08/30/2023

An application is an idea that has code, data and infrastructure, and choosing whether to build a conveyor belt or to put up guard rails along the path is important in maintaining velocity to the cloud.

For expert advice on how to do that in Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, Mike Benkovich is the man to see. The jack of all trades (developer, business owner, consultant, cloud architect, Microsoft Azure MVP and an online instructor) will share his hard-won expertise in a full-day session titled "Permit to Cloud - Land with confidence in Azure" at the big Live! 360 conference in November.

"In this session, we explore the tools available in Azure for creating and enforcing governance policy, standards and infrastructure, including Azure resource template technologies and Bicep, Azure blueprints, as well as DevOps processes including GitHub Actions that you can use to ensure your cloud journey is predictable, secure and compliant," Benkovich said. "We'll see how the tools work and share best practices for maturing your cloud journey."

Attendees can improve that journey by learning:

• The principles of Azure and cloud governance and the role it plays in ensuring a secure and reliable cloud environment
• How to build reliable delivery using Continuous Delivery tools and Infrastructure as Code
• Hands-on experience with compute and data storage options

We recently caught up with Benkovich to learn more about his session in a short Q&A.

VirtualizationCloudReview: What inspired you to present this workshop to help users ensure their cloud journey is predictable, secure and compliant?
Benkovich: I've worked on helping developers and organizations to understand how to migrate workload to the cloud, specifically Azure, since 2010 when I was at Microsoft and since I left in 2012. The steps to be able to do this can be complex and require deep knowledge of how the cloud works and the limits of what you can do.

I created this workshop as an evolution of the Azure Boot Camp workshops we developed when I was at Microsoft to be a bootstrap launching point for doing this and making that effort a success.

What are the main challenges and benefits of moving applications to the cloud?
The first challenge is understanding how the cloud is different from on-premises and what considerations do you need to take to be able to leverage the tools and features at hand. The cloud enables provisioning of compute, storage and other services very quickly to meet demand, where on premises would take much longer. Understanding the options and choosing wisely makes moving to the cloud work.

Cloud governance is often mentioned as a crucial component of a successful cloud journey. Could you elaborate on its principles and the specific role it plays in ensuring a cloud environment that is both secure and reliable?
Governance refers to having some agreement on how to name and tag things so that you are able to work with them in the future. Because the cloud allows you to use anything to name things is a very wide open net that makes it too easy to go down a rabbit hole that is hard to get out of later as you mature along the pathway to cloud maturity. Tagging is a feature that lets us add ways to organize and work with resources and services so we know what they are, why we care and who is paying for them. Starting with a solid strategy will increase visibility into how you're using your cloud investment. Governance also includes access management, which is how you give your team the rights to be able to view and manage your services, it's important to plan ahead how you want that to work.

The concept of choosing whether to build a conveyor belt or to put up guard rails along the cloud journey path is intriguing. In the context of moving applications to the cloud, can you explain what you mean by that?
Building a cloud enabled application is fairly simple, but doing it repeatedly and optimizing how you're doing it requires some thinking and forethought to do it right. The first time I build a cloud app means doing the minimum required to publish and run it there. Adding templates for infrastructure as code to provision resources and create the services needed at the point of deployment is a step up the maturity ladder to having a repeatable process. Adding DevOps and automated pipelines or workflow to trigger when changes are made is another step in that process. Ultimately we want to create an environment where it is logical and simple to add another workload and have it follow the patterns and processes we've defined to make it easier to deliver, but also easier to own.

Continuous delivery and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) are buzzwords in the DevOps realm. How do they fit into the "Permit to Cloud" philosophy, and how can Azure users leverage them to streamline their deployments?
These are tools and patterns of how to use the tools to help us mature our cloud presence. In any cloud deployment it is critical to be able to repeat a predictable result, and tools for Continuous Delivery (CD) and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enable us to do that. They are tools in our kit that we can and should use when and where it makes sense. In every tool category there are options to choose from. In our workshop we'll look at several of the options and give pros and cons for each to help us pick what works best for our situation.

GitHub Actions have become a popular choice for automating DevOps processes. How can they be utilized alongside Azure tools to ensure predictability, security, and compliance in cloud deployments?
GitHub Actions is a fork of the same codebase that is DevOps Pipelines, which means that it delivers the same basic functionality. The syntax and grammar of the YAML that defines the pipelines is unique to each, but they allow us to script up how the delivery should happen. They are the engines that deliver what we're building, where we define the process and let it run it. One nice feature is that it is consistent because each time it runs it creates the environment and tools it needs to deliver the code in a consistent way.

Note: Those wishing to attend the conference can save hundreds of dollars by registering early, according to the event's pricing page. "Save up to $400 if you register by September 22!" said the organizer of the event, which is presented by the parent company of Virtualization & Cloud Review.