A full transcription of the video is below.
“Hi I’m Jeff Rogers and I’m the CEO and founder of Big Green IT. Today we’d like to talk a bit about Azure and Azure Cloud. And what type of workloads go best, when should it be utilized and what do we see working in the marketplace.”
“I relate this probably a lot to one of our customers because they have all 3 of the use cases that actually make sense. And I think that the first thing we looked at which is making more sense than it did, say a year ago, is doing DR in the cloud. That’s the one place where it’s a huge investment, it’s like a giant insurance policy. We have to go get a second data center, we have to fill it with a bunch of expensive capital equipment that we may or may not ever use; hopefully we’ll never use it, but it sits there and it ages and it never gets utilized. So, being able to put that information, that DR, into the cloud, say Azure as an instance, we put that DR into the cloud and then we only pay for it; now we’ll pay for the cold storage which has come down tenfold since a year ago, let’s say. But we’re only paying the CPU utilization for the actual compute cycles if we ever turn it on. If we don’t turn it on, we’re not paying for those. And that’s very compelling in that sense. I don’t feel like, and I’m not wasting those dollars. I’m only utilizing those dollars in the case of a true DR scenario. We will pay for cold storage but, as I said, that price has come down tenfold in the last 12 months.”
“The next use case that we find is very compelling is high water marks. If you think about it, many times we’ve had to put hardware and hardware pricing together, and solutions for whatever the peak utilization is going to be. Oh, my gosh, we might hit here so we have to buy all this equipment for that one time. But most of the time we’re running down here and if you think about how Azure Cloud works, it’s billed, in a sense per minute. Of CPU, utilization of compute and things like that. So, if I’m always running down here or most of the time I am and I just need to burst up here for a few hours or a few days, great. I’m only paying that extra for the time I’m utilizing it, makes much more sense.”
“The third case is somewhat similar to that and that is those things that only happen once in a while. We have one particular customer that uses a tool to do cracking of passwords. It’s a very unique thing, they only use it once every month or so but they’ve had to buy dedicated resources; servers, physical servers, and storage and so forth to do this thing. And then it sits idle for a month, or two months and doesn’t get utilized. Well why would you pay for all that expensive capital equipment if it’s only going to be used on an occasional basis? So, that’s another great use case for looking at the cloud, and looking at Azure specifically for doing those “once-in-awhile” things.”
“I think all those add together. Everyone’s use case is different. The typical ones everyone thinks of are still the most prominent and that’s with test and with dev. But there are new tools out with companies like Veeam, that will do back-ups of your on premise to the cloud, and then allow you to promote those to usable volumes, in the cloud. And spin up, that’s another DR set, I can back-up and then I can DR to the cloud.”
“Lots of great use cases. If you haven’t looked at Azure in the last few months or the last year or two years, you really need to look again because everything in the world is changing very rapidly and the use cases; there are almost too many to list.”
“If you have any questions, you’re always welcome to reach out to myself at jeffr@biggreenit.com. I thank you for your time, have a great day.”
