Azure Stack Migrate
Whiteboard design session student guide
July 2020
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Contents
In this whiteboard design session, you will work with a group to design a hybrid cloud architecture using a combination of the Azure public cloud and Azure Stack. This functional architecture will enable customers to leverage their investments in Azure as a “cloud platform,” rather than Azure as a “place.”
At the end of the session, you will be able to determine which systems are good candidates for the Azure public cloud, and which are better suited on Azure Stack.
Outcome
Analyze your customer’s needs.
Timeframe: 15 minutes
Directions: With all participants in the session, the facilitator/SME presents an overview of the customer case study along with technical tips.
Meet your table participants and trainer.
Read all of the directions for steps 1-3 in the student guide.
As a table team, review the following customer case study.
Contoso Finance is one of the largest banks in the United States with a significant amount of their revenue coming from their residential mortgage business. Their mortgage business is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. During a meeting with the newly appointed CTO Doreen Newton, the IT team learned that Contoso is shifting to a cloud first strategy after seeing firsthand the advantages of the cloud from Doreen’s previous role leading her prior company through a digital transformation. Her message, “I have seen how applications and infrastructures are deployed and run using Microsoft Azure with both PaaS and IaaS services. These capabilities can transform Contoso with more agility and long-term cost effectiveness.” resonated with other members of the IT organization.
Contoso’s current workloads run in their Dallas based datacenter using VMWare based virtual machines. One of the primary applications the company is interested in modernizing to take advantage of the cloud is a consumer facing mortgage application. This application is handling new mortgage requests and facilitating access of consumers to their current mortgage information. The current implementation of the mortgage application is hosted in a public facing website on Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) with a backend database using SQL Server 2012. The application has several modules that run as Windows Services. These modules are responsible for running credit checks and generating PDFs for transactions. The application uses Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) for interacting between modules. The application also allows customers to download several publicly accessible PDF files that provide an overview of the bank’s mortgage related products.
As the result of a recent acquisition of a financial analytics company named Fabrikam, based in Houston, Texas, Contoso IT management team plans to integrate a number of Fabrikam’s internally developed applications to process and analyze the customer data being used by the Contoso’s customer facing mortgage application. Fabrikam has skilled development and infrastructure teams, with extensive Azure experience and its own Azure Active Directory tenant. Contoso is very interested in leveraging that experience and plans to offer the Fabrikam IT team sufficient level of autonomy when working on the integration tasks. That autonomy should include the ability of the Fabrikam IT team to offer to their users cloud resources required for application development, implementation, and maintenance. At the same time, Contoso wants to ensure proper governance and facilitate implementation of corporate standards via centralized control of the service catalog content and through automation.
During the planning stages, Contoso realized they would not be able to move their customer, on-premises resident data to US based Azure regions due to corporate compliance policies and regulatory issues. “This was a cause for great concern, as this means Contoso may not be able to move to cloud-based services as fast as we initially envisioned” says Max Rubin, VP of Network Engineering. Doreen Newton took on the challenge to investigate alternatives to allow Contoso to proceed with getting the benefits of the cloud while not breaking rules for corporate compliance.
To help design a solution using Azure technologies, Contoso has engaged a Microsoft Cloud Partner and Service Provider FusionTomo (FT). FT is a full-service hosting provider in North America certified to deliver Azure services with connectivity solutions and partnerships to provide ExpressRoute and other telecom services. They have datacenters located in Denver, London, Las Vegas, Dallas and Hong Kong SAR.
Contoso has expressed to FT the need to embrace Microsoft Azure technologies as well as technologies that will help their organization with a more agile continuous integration and continuous deployment model for application deployment. Contoso also underscored the need for cooperation with Fabrikam’s integration teams, including the intent to delegate some of the infrastructure management tasks.
With these goals in mind, Contoso has challenged FT to implement a hosted environment that will accommodate requirements regarding integration work to be carried out by Fabrikam. In addition, as internal workloads are transitioned to the hosting environment, Contoso’s internal audit team must retain its ability to track all of the infrastructure changes. For compliance purposes, the delegation model that will provide Contoso and Fabrikam staff with insight into the hosted environment must comply with the principle of least privilege. To satisfy Contoso governance requirements, FT must document standard operating procedures that will be carried out within the hosted infrastructure.
Contoso is looking for FT to provide the following for their expansion into North America:
Design a hybrid-cloud architecture that is native Azure end-to-end without the need for hosting the application in a Contoso owned datacenter.
The design should ensure that customer data is not stored in the Azure Cloud while also allowing future applications to be easily deployed in Azure with access to custom data regardless of where they are deployed.
Deploy the application in a secure manner as to allow for the frontend applications to access the backend customer data.
Establish direct connectivity from the new regional headquarters in Dallas to the deployments. This will allow communication with existing systems and reporting until the rest of Contoso’s services are moved to Azure in the future.
Allow for a consistent application deployment model using Azure ARM templates and CI/CD.
Detail the taxonomy that will be leveraged for the hybrid-cloud including the Resource Providers (RP) This includes tenants, regions, subscriptions, offers, plans, services and quota.
Design an integration model that would allow resource access for both Contoso and Fabrikam users.
Propose a self-service approach that will allow Contoso and Fabrikam developers to provision their own resources from the service catalog offered by infrastructure teams. The scope of resources available in service catalog must be controlled centrally, with an oversight by designated Contoso and Fabrikam administrators.
Recommend a procedure for delegation of permissions that would not only allow designated Fabrikam IT admins to manage Contoso infrastructure but also account for the need to provide limited access to the Contoso internal audit team.
Suggest a methodology that would facilitate implementing corporate standards by automating the process of resource provisioning and configuration.
Document standard operational tasks such as infrastructure backup and log collection.
The Mortgage SQL DB cannot be hosted in the public cloud.
Contoso staff is already stretched thin, so minimizing patching of systems and day-to-day management is very important.
The developer team acknowledges that the existing application architecture is designed for running on Windows Virtual Machines, but PaaS is the future they envision. How can they move this application forward?
One of the key reasons Contoso wants to go to the cloud is to take advantage of tools and services for automated deployments and application development. Will Azure Stack make it to where we must use two skillsets?
Fabrikam has already its own Azure Active Directory tenant. Will it be necessary to create duplicate accounts for Fabrikam users?
Outcome
Design a solution and prepare to present the solution to the target customer audience in a 15-minute chalk-talk format.
Timeframe: 60 minutes
Business needs
Directions: With all participants at your table, answer the following questions and list the answers on a flip chart:
Who should you present this solution to? Who is your target customer audience? Who are the decision makers?
What customer business needs do you need to address with your solution?
Design
With all participants at your table, respond to the following questions on a flip chart:
Design a hybrid-cloud architecture using Azure services that will make up the implementation for Contoso.
Identify the overall application design you would propose for modernizing their existing application into Azure.
List the services and components that will be deployed to Azure public cloud. For each, provide their basic function in the system. Determine which Azure Region will be best suited for the deployment.
List the services and components that will be deployed to Azure Stack. For each, provide their basic function in the system.
Determine which identity provider and which identity topology you will use to facilitate authentication and authorization of the Azure Stack environment.
Describe different delegation mechanisms can be employed to facilitate controlled access to Azure Stack resources.
Establish which common infrastructure management tasks must be implemented and maintained by designated Azure Stack operators.
Identify how applications such as the Mortgage App and other infrastructure workloads could be deployed in a consistent manner between Azure Public and Azure Stack.
Plan and document Azure Stack taxonomy for this deployment.
Document each of the following areas of the taxonomy with details on how it will be setup:
Cloud Operator
Region
Tenant
Subscriptions
Plans and quotas
Offers
Services / Resource Providers
Diagram your taxonomy.
Create a network design.
Prepare
Directions: With all participants at your table:
Identify any customer needs that are not addressed with the proposed solution.
Identify the benefits of your solution.
Determine how you will respond to the customer’s objections.
Prepare a 15-minute chalk-talk style presentation to the customer.
Outcome
Present a solution to the target customer audience in a 15-minute chalk-talk format.
Timeframe: 30 minutes
Presentation
Directions:
Pair with another table.
One table is the Microsoft team and the other table is the customer.
The Microsoft team presents their proposed solution to the customer.
The customer makes one of the objections from the list of objections.
The Microsoft team responds to the objection.
The customer team gives feedback to the Microsoft team.
Tables switch roles and repeat Steps 2-6.
Timeframe: 15 minutes
Directions: Tables reconvene with the larger group to hear the facilitator/SME share the preferred solution for the case study.