MS Azure

[sippo]

One of our primary school governors has asked why we aren't using MS Azure. I'm not sure to be honest as apparently it's free. I'm guessing it's quite difficult to setup, and does it take much management?

 

I'm after pro's and con's.

[localzuk]

What part of Azure are they talking about? It isn't free - just the basic Azure AD is free. Things like running servers, storing data etc... all costs money.

[sippo]

Is it expensive? This governor works for MS, and I don't think he realises how schools run.

[swarohi]

Might have meant the free version of Office 365? As localzuk mentioned above, Azure is technically free in that you can make an account without any cost but everything useful is a paid feature. Azure is priced depending on how much data, bandwidth etc you use. I have used this tool, Azure pricing tool to get a price for using Azure to backup our servers and it worked out quite cheap. Edited November 15, 2017 by swarohi

[TechMonkey]

If he works for MS, US HIM!! Obviously it depends on what area he works in but he could be a very good ally to have on the Governors. Set up a meeting, discuss your vision, your plan, what you do at the moment, what annoys you, ask him his thoughts, what does he know from MS that you could use, can he go and kick someone in the nuts about licensing. He can then at least go to the governors fully informed of your situation and probably help fight your corner.

[FN-GM]

I would consider this as a conflict of interest. It isn't really appropriate for the governor to go down this route IMO.

[matt40k]

I would consider this as a conflict of interest. It isn't really appropriate for the governor to go down this route IMO.

Assuming he's declare it and they don't blindly make those decisions - ie they actually look at Google Apps, and ultimately he doesn't call the shots - should be OK. It's always good to get a new point of view (assuming its just that).

[localzuk]

That's the thing - Azure is a huge platform filled with many different products, ranging from hosting virtual servers to artificial intelligence to databases. It isn't a case of being expensive or not - it all depends on what you do with it. For example, we use it for storing backups here, at a cost of about £40 per month.

[sted]

it also depends to some extent on teh speed/reliability of your internet connection. if the best you can get in your area is 5mb azure isnt a viable solution to much

[matt40k]

Sorry I read Governor said Azure as Office 365. Going fully cloud requires a rethink. If you do like-for-like it doesn't make much sense in most cases. If you take your backups - if you're including user data - why aren't they using OneDrive\SharePoint - if your backing them up onto Azure, what value does backing up Azure onto Azure add? If you're backing up fat VMs (nasty), if you're backing up dbs - Azure DB gives you backups every 15 mins, so... Not saying you wouldn't need Azure storage for backups, just it should be alot smaller.

 

Alot of assumptions, not a lot of info.

[sippo]

For our MAT though, I am thinking Azure would be quite expensive. Do many schools use it? I have no knowledge of it, so would need extensive training i'm guessing.

[localzuk]

For our MAT though, I am thinking Azure would be quite expensive. Do many schools use it? I have no knowledge of it, so would need extensive training i'm guessing.

If you were to just transplant what you have now into Azure, yes, that'd be expensive. For us, doing that would double our costs. However, the "cloud" dream is to change the way you do things - so, instead of using SMB shares for files, you have your staff put things in OneDrive. You migrate away from "client side" applications to web services etc...

[matt40k]

... and you don't leave server running overnight \ school holidays \ weekends...

[chris_uk]

That's the thing - Azure is a huge platform filled with many different products, ranging from hosting virtual servers to artificial intelligence to databases. It isn't a case of being expensive or not - it all depends on what you do with it. For example, we use it for storing backups here, at a cost of about £40 per month.

 

@localzuk - Would you mind if I drop you a PM about this?

 

Thanks

Chris

Edited November 15, 2017 by chris_uk
typo

[AlanD]

I always think some get very "blinkered" about using the cloud...particularly at higher levels of management....almost as if using it is an end in itself. The "free" web based office 365 isn't great to be honest - I'd certainly rather use a desktop with Office 2016 installed....and tablet apps require the paid for versions...Google wins hands down here....although some are reluctant to make this move. And while my Backup Exec server and tape library work with no on going costs (...except new box of tapes every now and again) I'm not about to tear it out because cloud backup offers me something it doesn't in terms of ability to recover a working server or retrieve a file. Nor am I about the throw our my exchange server and then have to find budget to increase my internet costs so that outlook works at a reasonable speed. Of course as and when these things are end of life - then I will be happy to weigh up all the pros and cons...

[HPlum78]

I have said this before about cloud based solutions, so here goes again. If you are replacing existing servicable infrastructure for IaaS then you will pay more period, if however your hardware is end of life then you should be thinking about how it would look in a cloud Enviroment.

 

If you are able to take up PaaS (cheaper) or SaaS (cheaper still) offerings then the cost starts to fall. No one is saying lift and shift infrastructure in to any cloudy provider (MS included), what you should be thinking about is transformational/ new services. If you are standing up IIS on a server for a web app then I guarantee that a cloudy provider is going to be cheaper with a SaaS solution.

 

Office 365 is a SaaS solution and as such is cheap and for education it's just there, if you have the thick wedge of 20k (plus supporting infrastructure) worth of Exchange deployment needing replacing then Exchange online is cheaper (I know first hand!) but there is a tipping point, and the scales of economy are not there if you are running Exchange on a single server.

 

The cloud is not a replacement it's an option and when you are going to scope out a new service or its time to review existing services a cloudy deployment should be considered and a true costing of an on prem deployment should inform any decision.

 

Any how it's late and I zzzzzzz

Edited November 16, 2017 by HPlum78

[localzuk]

@localzuk - Would you mind if I drop you a PM about this?

Thanks

Chris

Sure, that's fine.

[rich_tech]

I am migrating our company to azure hosted services for a lot of stuff, I dont know if schools get discount from the pricing for VMs comparatively, but it is not cheap for that type of virtualisation hosting (though I gather its cheaper than some alternatives comparatively) and I would urge you to be weary looking at it, given the tight finances at schools.

 

Storage and backups is fine with it as already pointed out by @localzuk, that is fairly inexpensive and decent enough to rig up easily, but regarding the VMs and using them as you would a normal server, be very weary of the costs, the first two tiers of the A0 and 1 Class servers are fairly pointless as they creak along slowly and painfully, so your looking at A2 minimum for the server not to creak and chug along.

 

As a guidelin at the moment, ours is just over 1100 a month, we have 10 VMs up there (and I still have 7 more to add there), backups, 2 of these servers are higher end D2_V2_Promo, the rest is a mix of A2 and A1 for a couple of things where you can just leave a web app run and not care about speed.

 

Its gone from 220 pcm when I started to this with two simple VMs on there, just by adding on servers and storage.

 

Also - it is worth stating that if your late paying the invoice or CC bill, M$ will pull the plug on all your services immediately until you hastily pay (that happened to us before I worked here apparently)

Edited November 16, 2017 by rich_tech

[HPlum78]

@rich_tech I would say step back before you virtualise any more servers in the cloud as I said above IaaS is not the way to leverage the cloud, you are paying a lot of money to have someone host your servers that's almost c£1300 per VM per year! c13K a year all in! (it not such a simplistic calculation I know, but you see the point). In one year that's a bill that would get a good VM infrastructure that would probably have a 5 year write down and could be capitalised (unlike taking a service). Now don't get me wrong I think cloud solutions have a place and am not saying don't use the cloud but that sort of money surly is unsustainable....

[matt40k]

Sounds like your using the PAYG also rather then having a schools agreement (or such) Rich

[rich_tech]

We are pay as you go here, not schools agreement, I am in the middle of a consolidation exercise here with it, our products account for a fair chunk of the cost

[matt40k]

You should see a nice drop when you switch over then!

[rich_tech]

to be fair I did an exercise in Azure yesterday and today which has probably dropped about 300 a month off it from the costs which is good (some stuff was put in place by a 3rd party company when I started here, which I have improved and scaled back upon and there was a little bit of duplication in setups I found)

 

To clarify, I am indeed putting our EOL infrastructure up there and migrating a lot of stuff from Citrix to VMWare to Azure(long story there, dont ask....), some of its going to be basically kept deallocated and isolated then when it is migrated and retained for our legal hold periods. Its good, lot of learning needed though prior to make sure you dont waste money and also I would say that it isnt the magic bullet either.

 

Some stuff cant be done from their servers (DHCP is one such service) and also its a PITA when you hit the arbitrary limits and have to raise tickets to get things like vCPU amounts increased.

[jmak]

One of our primary school governors has asked why we aren't using MS Azure. I'm not sure to be honest as apparently it's free. I'm guessing it's quite difficult to setup, and does it take much management?

 

I'm after pro's and con's.

IIRC an on premise standard server licence allows you the same in Azure (it came up when Edugeek hosted a web chat with MS about the changes to schools licensing) which might be where the "it's free"cubes from. AFAIK you still have to pay for processing and storage, so no actually free. As someone else said, I'd definitely try and get him on side and see what you can get out of MS - as long as he's declared his pecuniary interests, there's no reason not to take advantage.

[Disease]

Is there any discounts for schools for azure services?