Archipelego1 Posted June 5, 2019 Posted June 5, 2019 Afternoon all, A couple of us at our school have been on an Azure fundamentals course, where we learned about what Azure can do. We already have 365 and AD connect setup, we've also just setup a Wordpress site as a little test. However, I'm intrigued to know if anyone's using Azure for anything else, or if you have any plans to migrate services to Azure. Thanks in advance
supportman Posted June 5, 2019 Posted June 5, 2019 Had a quick play with the free credits myself, but can't see too much use for it in a SASS (Software as a Service) world. Maybe for backups but I still just have our backup in a separate building at the moment.
localzuk Posted June 5, 2019 Posted June 5, 2019 We currently use Azure for: 1. Blob storage for offsite DR backups 2. DNS for all our external facing domains 3. Hosting a "status" website We will likely end up growing this use over time, as we are planning on going "onsite serverless" over the next 2 years.
HPlum78 Posted June 5, 2019 Posted June 5, 2019 Huh, ask someone with a horse and carriage what would make you more effective "Another horse" is the answer that's because they don't know that the car exists. SaaS is exactly what you should be thinking about using it for if not PaaS. I have posted about this more than once and its late.... And having just spent yesterday taking with Jeff Snover mayby you should listen to some of his channel 9 stuff and then decide what Azure can/ should be used for.
Archipelego1 Posted June 6, 2019 Author Posted June 6, 2019 Thanks for the replies so far. I'm looking more for real world examples of what some of you folks are currently (or in the process of) using Azure for, not really what MS and other suppliers say it can do for you.
localzuk Posted June 6, 2019 Posted June 6, 2019 Our future plans might be: Moving our internally hosted web stuff to Moving our AD to it, so it isn't on-site Potentially hosting SIMS (but this would be a bodge, so it isn't my favoured solution) SSO for AD users with Google Apps etc... The thing is, as schools/trusts, we don't really look at Azure for its SaaS stuff - we look at products that do. So, we wouldn't look at their Queues and Azure database stuff and think "ah, yes, that'll help". We buy a library system or whatever that is hosted on Azure and uses those things. As end users, our direct uses for Azure are more in the PaaS realm I'd say. 2
HPlum78 Posted June 6, 2019 Posted June 6, 2019 (edited) So yeah try your up most not to use IaaS as that's not where you are going to realise any cost benifits really. As already noted above stuff for a school would be PaaS in the most part I guess so web apps rather than standing up an IIS server, SQL is offered as PaaS now so you could start to leverage that potentially instead of on prem SQL boxes. Each use case is individual and you need to take what is most appropriate as unless you are a greenfield it's unlikely that you are just going to take a cloud only approach in any flavour. Also you should try to build solutions that don't have a mass of cross dependencies between on prem and cloud services. We use a multitude of Azure offerings, Web apps, data factory, functions and function apps the list is never ending. But we develope our own solutions. Like the creation of team sites is based on an Azure function using Flow and our IT Ticketing system. We have a function that populates our students/ staff Outlook calendars with data that is sent from our timetableing solution using the graph API (10000 calls a min as apposed to EWS 50!) So if I am trying to say anything it's that it's hard to say you should do this or that more of what do you want to ultimately achieve.... Edited June 6, 2019 by HPlum78
sted Posted June 6, 2019 Posted June 6, 2019 ive played with a lot of it on test accounts ive had intune up and running so completely cloud managed pcs and users. log in with their email address to a win10 oobe and it sets them up applies policies and installed acrobat reader/office/paint.net set up onedrive to sync docs desktop and the other folder it can autosync played with azure information protection a bit but not got it working to a point in happy with single sign on both cloud only and hybrid with on site ad theres a lot it can do but its all been on disposable test accounts 1
bicky Posted June 13, 2019 Posted June 13, 2019 We have Site-to-Site VPN with the Azure. Few servers hosted: Additional DC for each of our domains Application Server (this hosts licensing server for several software, portable applications etc) Print Server (PaperCut Site Server) Net2Access Paxton Server We also use Intune to manage the Staff Windows 10 Surfaces. Devices are joined to AZ AD then used Intune to manage/deploy the settings/policies & the software (Office 365, Chrome, Adobe Reader, TeamViewer, VLC) 2
supportman Posted June 13, 2019 Posted June 13, 2019 We have Site-to-Site VPN with the Azure. Few servers hosted: Additional DC for each of our domains Application Server (this hosts licensing server for several software, portable applications etc) Print Server (PaperCut Site Server) Net2Access Paxton Server We also use Intune to manage the Staff Windows 10 Surfaces. Devices are joined to AZ AD then used Intune to manage/deploy the settings/policies & the software (Office 365, Chrome, Adobe Reader, TeamViewer, VLC) Very cool! The future for sure. Glad you are the one testing it though... and not me
jackhunt Posted June 16, 2019 Posted June 16, 2019 Hi Bicky, We (7 school MAC) are going more and more cloud based (We have just moved AD to Azure and used Intune to replace Group Policy). I am interested in the hosted Papercut model. I know there are a couple of ways of doing this (Complete Azure management by in house IT and managed by a reseller in Azure). What sort of spec Azure server are you using to run Papercut? and what are the monthly costs for this? Many Thanks Jack
dmj Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 My last school moved multiple services to cloud (Google Compute Engine in that case) and here I'm working more with Azure and AWS. Previously I had moved over web services, domain controllers, redundant DHCP and the like. From my experience it is a mistake to do a wholsale lift and shift - it is too costly. The reasoning is that most services run at full load during a working day and then have virtually no load during holidays and nighttime - but they still need to be available and cloud providers charge by the minute! The technology that works around this dilemma is containerisation coupled with a platform such a kubernetes (which runs on Azure AKS, Google, AWS and on-premesis) to manage the containers. The idea is simply that you run the base minimum of kubernetes servers and as your load increases you automatically deploy more nodes and then kubernetes scales out your applications to take account of the load. I have a few test machines, mostly with web services and it is working quite nicely although I am not sure when we are migrating the load off premise onto azure/aws/google. Ideally we'd like to be able to switch between platforms with relative ease. The general strategy is: implement a logging and hyperconverged filesystem infrastructure Work out which services lend themselves to containerisation and then implement it. Make sure to build the containers in an ephemeral way so they can be created and destroyed without data loss. Run kubernetes on premise and get a handle on managing the containers move the containers directly into cloud providers The really nice thing about ephemeral containers is that you can run preemptible vm's (I think they are called spot instances? in azure) - they cost 80% less than a normal vm but might get turned off as the cloud provider needs the resources - but it doesn't matter because kubernetes will just reschedule the load elsewhere and your service won't miss a beat !
localzuk Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 That all sounds interesting @dmj but I have a question about this: Make sure to build the containers in an ephemeral way so they can be created and destroyed without data loss. That very much depends on the service does it not? A lot of software, legacy stuff, would simply not work like that.That all sounds interesting @dmj but I have a question about this:
dmj Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 That all sounds interesting @dmj but I have a question about this: That very much depends on the service does it not? A lot of software, legacy stuff, would simply not work like that. Yes it does. As with virtualization was in its infancy, not all services are great candidates for containerization - sims, for example is a no hoper! Larger services can be subdivided into small containers and all run inside a single pod using the same address space. It does take some thinking about and as with all IT there is never a single way of doing things.
localzuk Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 Yes it does. As with virtualization was in its infancy, not all services are great candidates for containerization - sims, for example is a no hoper! Larger services can be subdivided into small containers and all run inside a single pod using the same address space. It does take some thinking about and as with all IT there is never a single way of doing things. I'm just trying to think of any service in use in a school that would work in containers like this, and I'm struggling to think of any...
TechMonkey Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 We currently only have an offsite DC connected by VPN as a backup. This would be if everything went absolutely Pete Tong then we could connect to it to authenticate and also have a base to get our AD backup to speed once we have hardware. Like localzuk, we have started looking at the possibility of the serverless world and how we move that way, what servers we wouldn't need anymore, what servers we have to have but could be in the cloud and what services will not work at all and we need to migrate before anything can happen. As HPlum78 pointed out, our biggest issue is the massive change in mindset and not knowing what we don't know. But I think after a good audit and a thunk we will be in a good position. From a quick post-it note scrawl I think most things will be ok and those that may be problematic are actually IT systems and things we have bodged together.
FishCustard Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 We currently use Azure for: 1. Blob storage for offsite DR backups 2. DNS for all our external facing domains 3. Hosting a "status" website We will likely end up growing this use over time, as we are planning on going "onsite serverless" over the next 2 years. Do you just pay for this usage as you go, or do you get what you need as part of one of the advanced (i.e. not free!) education licensing packs?
localzuk Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 Do you just pay for this usage as you go, or do you get what you need as part of one of the advanced (i.e. not free!) education licensing packs? We buy credit via an MS reseller, and pay as we go. 1
FishCustard Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 Good to know - thanks! Is there a financial advantage to buying through a reseller over just paying MS directly?
localzuk Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 Good to know - thanks! Is there a financial advantage to buying through a reseller over just paying MS directly? You get a little bit of discount - think we pay £73.50 for £80 of credit IIRC. 1
dmj Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 I'm just trying to think of any service in use in a school that would work in containers like this, and I'm struggling to think of any... Any lamp web service would be a safe bet, but also RADIUS, auth servers, DHCP, DNS, file shares, mail relays. Where you'd get unstuck is with the monolithic applications like SIMS - but it is conceivable to do these to (external DB, seperate samba file shares etc) if you were willing to forego Capita support - so it's probably not worth bothering with.
FishCustard Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 You get a little bit of discount - think we pay £73.50 for £80 of credit IIRC. Good to know - thanks for your insight.
localzuk Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 Any lamp web service would be a safe bet, but also RADIUS, auth servers, DHCP, DNS, file shares, mail relays. Where you'd get unstuck is with the monolithic applications like SIMS - but it is conceivable to do these to (external DB, seperate samba file shares etc) if you were willing to forego Capita support - so it's probably not worth bothering with. This all sounds like Linux stuff to be honest, when most schools run Windows for everything. So, if you were going to make a huge jump from Windows to Linux, you'd more realistically make the jump to SaaS and PaaS stuff instead of building your own. There will be very few schools who would do what you have listed. And forgoing Capita support for SIMS would be a major no-no, as SIMS is so important from a safeguarding and data protection POV. Support is a necessity. Lamp? Why not just use the native web hosting plans with Azure, and native Mysql hosting? Radius I can see, as there doesn't appear to be a native radius service in Azure as yet. DHCP? Not sure of the value of that - its one of the few things you'd leave on-site. DNS, Azure Private DNS, etc...
dmj Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 Most of the cutting edge enterprise systems are started on Linux, but they soon get developed for windows. You can run a kubernetes windows node since version 1.14. So the only thing that is preventing you from running this way on windows is that most of the support is for linux. It would still work though
bicky Posted June 17, 2019 Posted June 17, 2019 Hi Bicky, We (7 school MAC) are going more and more cloud based (We have just moved AD to Azure and used Intune to replace Group Policy). I am interested in the hosted Papercut model. I know there are a couple of ways of doing this (Complete Azure management by in house IT and managed by a reseller in Azure). What sort of spec Azure server are you using to run Papercut? and what are the monthly costs for this? Many Thanks Jack Hi Jack, We are running it on Standard_B2ms (2 vCPU, 8GB RAM, Server 2016) - costs about £50 per month.
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