Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?
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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.
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@dave247 said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
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
You can do that as-is using AAD Connect and such. MS has a bunch of good documentation on doing O365 and SSO from onprem AD.
I wouldn't simply pick up your VMs and host them somewhere more expensive... Which is really anywhere else.
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@Obsolesce said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
I wouldn't simply pick up your VMs and host them somewhere more expensive... Which is really anywhere else.
Unless the OP's company have a real datacenter in house, it can actually make sense to move equipment just for that reason. Most SMBs don't have power redundancy, redundant cooling, redundant internet connections, fire suppression and what not.
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@Pete-S said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
@Obsolesce said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
I wouldn't simply pick up your VMs and host them somewhere more expensive... Which is really anywhere else.
Unless the OP's company have a real datacenter in house, it can actually make sense to move equipment just for that reason. Most SMBs don't have power redundancy, redundant cooling, redundant internet connections, fire suppression and what not.
And sometimes datacenters actually lower your overall cost because of better Internet and power deals.
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@scottalanmiller said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
@Pete-S said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
@Obsolesce said in Path from on-prem Windows servers to hosted/cloud (Azure)?:
I wouldn't simply pick up your VMs and host them somewhere more expensive... Which is really anywhere else.
Unless the OP's company have a real datacenter in house, it can actually make sense to move equipment just for that reason. Most SMBs don't have power redundancy, redundant cooling, redundant internet connections, fire suppression and what not.
And sometimes datacenters actually lower your overall cost because of better Internet and power deals.
Very true.
Going from having your servers on-prem to having them in a colocation datacenter is exactly like going from physical servers to VMs. More consolidation, higher utilization and the economies of scale.
