Introduction to Local and Cloud Concepts

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] You know, one of the challenges with the cloud, especially if maybe you haven't been experienced with it before or you've kind of just heard the term the cloud, and it just sounds kind of enigmatic. It sounds like kind of like a mystery, this undefinable thing that we think is probably on the internet somewhere. So what really is the cloud? How do we kind of corral it mentally and understand what it is and how it relates to some of the things we're going to be using particularly in our topics here, which revolve around Microsoft 365?

0:38And to discuss that, I think it's really better if we start just locally, right? OK, so if you just have a local computer, let's say a home computer, you got this home computer right here-- and this tower computer. And you've got a few things that you can visually see on it, right? You got-- oh, there's probably a little place here for power to plug into the wall. There's probably a card or two here, probably a video card here. In this video card, you plug in a kind of an external monitor, I'm sure. And maybe that's what you're watching this on right now, something like that.

1:11You have probably several USB ports. Attached to one of those might be your keyboard. It looks like it's got bread crumbs or something like that on there. You probably got another thing attached to it. That's probably your mouse or your track ball or something like that. What else would you have? Maybe a webcam. And that's kind of what I've got too. That's what I'm recording on. I've got a computer much like this with all of these various things attached to it. Now, what are we missing there? Well, there's also a motherboard here. And I'm not going to be able to draw that in there because, as you can see-- if you've never seen any of my videos before, as you can see here, I have limited artistic ability.

1:49I know. It's shocking looking at this. You probably think that I'm going to make an NFT out of this or something and make a billion dollars or something. But anyway, inside of this, we also have other things, don't we? We have a CPU, or the processor. Basically, it doesn't really do the thinking for our computer. But we kind of say that it does the brains. It's the brains of our computer. We also have memory in here. Memory sticks is what we usually call them. There's probably two to four in most home PCs.

2:20Then there's one more thing which I haven't really discussed yet. And that would be the storage. And on this storage is usually what we call our hard drive. Very often, it's a rectangular device that has magnetic platters inside of it. You never open and look at it. You know what these are, right? Hard drive. And that's where we store everything. That's where we store our data. These would be family photos, Word documents, videos from your family vacation, or any other kind of videos.

2:51This is also where we would store our applications primarily. And of course, the overarching thing there would be your operating system. Usually, it's like Windows or something like this. But anyway, all of this is self-contained within a single unit right here. And even if you're someone who's not been accustomed to computing in the past or something like that, or you're getting new into technology, this is all under your purview. It's all under your control. You may have installed the operating system. You may have installed the applications. You put the data on there.

3:22You copied the photos there. Now, take all of that, and add the internet. So beyond all of this, you probably have some kind of a Wi-Fi. I don't even know how to-- if I can put in a Wi-Fi thing here. Let's just put it off to here and make it a Wi-Fi signal that's reaching out to your internet service provider that connects to your office or your home. And then that, of course, in turn will connect to the internet at large. And this is a lot of times where just the mental connection between the cloud and the internet gets a little fuzzy because the cloud is contained in and dependent upon the internet.

4:01Without the internet, we have no cloud. But the internet is not equal to the cloud. There's not an equal sign between those two. And the cloud is actually a number of different vendors. There are different companies that comprise the cloud. And they all have their own cloud, so to speak. One of those obviously is Microsoft. You also have other companies out there. I'll just put some out here. There's, again, Microsoft. There's Amazon. They have something called Amazon Web Services, or AWS. VMware is another company out there.

4:33Who else? Well, Google. Google has a cloud as well. These are all gigantic, by the way, multibillion dollar organizations with multibillion dollar investments in their cloud solutions. But if I'm at home here and I'm on my computer and my internet goes down, which it did, by the way, just last week, and when that happened, I was limited to only what I could access on my local computer here. It was debilitating not to be able to connect to the internet and all of these cloud services out there.

5:05This went on for like two days. I didn't know what to do with myself. It was terrible. Couldn't watch Netflix. Couldn't get on TikTok. Couldn't access Instagram, any of that kind of stuff. All right, now this-- I just kind of want to point out what some of this stuff is and where it exists. We're going to get into more detail about that later on. But this is where we start. This is us in our own self-contained environment. And this is the cloud out here encompassed within the internet. All right, so there's a separation there. We have local resources here in our own office or in our own home.

5:39And we're using our phones, our tablets, our laptops, our desktop computers. And we're in almost constant communication probably to some kind of a cloud resource much of the time without even really realizing that it's going on. Now, in the next Nuggets coming up, we're going to be discussing some of those resources and the advantages of using them. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] In our last Nugget, we took a look at kind of a typical PC situation, where you have a home computer, maybe in a small office. You have your phones. You have your tablets, all these kinds of things. And that doesn't relate to the cloud on its own. However, in today's society and in today's technologies, just about everybody is using the cloud, whether they realize it or not. Now, let's take this to a company level.

0:30Now, on a company level, we start off with some of the same stuff, right? We still have users that are all using maybe desktop PCs. A lot of them will be using laptops and/or tablets. We may have cell phones that we are also managing here. But in kind of the traditional business sense, if we're not using the cloud particularly, then all that stuff's kind of contained within our company. So maybe this is our own office building here. And maybe this desktop computer and the lap-- all those little devices there are located in my corner office right here.

1:04Now, I'm going to be working on documents. And I understand that as a user. And those documents are going to get saved somewhere, right? So we tend to think in a local situation that our files are going to get saved either on the local hard drive right here. We call them hard drives. But very often, they're SSDs now, Solid State Drives. Or maybe if we do have maybe a mapped network drive, then it saves it to a network location. So very often, a data center for a corporation that runs their own data centers will have those on the bottom floor very often.

1:36It makes it easier to load and unload big things like big racks, big power supplies, big UPSes, which are giant batteries that are backup power, easier to connect to generators in case you have a power outage, all that kind of stuff. So anyway, a lot of times a data center will be on the ground floor. So let's say that I'm creating a database, really a database record, actually. And it has a new customer-- their name, their address, what they purchased, how much they purchased, whatever, stuff like that. And if I'm entering all that in over the phone with my customer here in my little corner office on my laptop, I would understand that it probably gets self-saved down into our data center here locally.

2:17And that's how it was done for a long time. Some organizations will still be doing that to whatever degree. Now, in a strictly corporate environment, where, again, we're not using the cloud per se, you might be a big organization. You might not just have one office. So maybe this is my Phoenix office where I live right here. And maybe we have an Albuquerque office here. And maybe we have a Dallas office. They're all going to be connected by usually what we call a WAN link, Wide Area Network link. So this is something that we pay for to give us a network connection to those remote offices.

2:50A couple of different ways you could do it, a few different ways. It could be a dedicated line, which is very expensive. Or you could just use your normal internet connection and create what we call a VPN through here. But a lot of different ways to do that. Regardless, we have network connectivity between our offices. Now, let's add to that. Maybe we have so much need for computing resources and all those sorts of things that our little server room in our initial office there, it can't handle it anymore. So we've got to expand. And we have to start trusting another company with our data.

3:21Now, we're not in the cloud yet. But we can use something else here called colocation, or colo, as we often call it. This means that instead of using everything-- I might still have a data center in my own office. But we're a lot of times off-loading that now into other locations. These are third parties that we have entrusted with our data and our computing resources. And we pay them money to have these big server racks for us usually. And it might look like what we have over here on the left. And to give you some sense of scale, this might be a person here.

3:53This would be about the approximate height of them. They're usually, actually about 73 inches, I think-- 73 inches high, usually 24 inches wide like this. And I can't really draw depth. But from front to back, it's usually 42 inches, if I remember right. So you get the idea about how big those particular racks are. Well, these will store servers in them. They'll have lots of computing power in them. They may have multiple processors. They may have a whole bunch of hard drives as well. I'll show you some other examples here coming up.

4:23But I just wanted to show you that these appear in these big racks. Now, these big racks could have been originally what was in my own first floor over here. But these are very likely to be also what we have in these data centers now that we are using for colocation. Now, we still don't have the cloud though. I'm going to be talking about this in a future Nugget, about why we would want to move to the cloud away from all of this. See, we're still managing everything. Even these colocations down here, we can walk into those most of the time. And we can put in our own servers in one of these rack positions or our own hard drives in one of these rack positions.

4:58In colocations, our IT staff is usually walking in the building and managing all of those things. Like I said before, we're going to talk about why we might move to the cloud instead of using all of this solution. But before we get to that, I want to point out that, yes, the cloud can off-load all of this for us. It's not going to be for everybody in every situation. But most companies are using at least some of the cloud now. And many companies are depending on it heavily. So we might be able to take all or a lot of this and just put it into the cloud. Now, that just gives you kind of an introduction into how we've traditionally done it.

5:31So in our next Nugget, I'm going to go over a little bit more of the physical layout of the cloud. That's one of the things that is a little bit difficult when you're first getting involved in the cloud is to understand the physical structure of it, because a cloud, when you think of a physical cloud, like up in the sky, that's not very defined. And it's kind of nebulous and everything like that. So we want to put some concrete terms on the cloud, how we connect to it, what it is. And we'll see that in our next Nugget. I hope this has been informative for you. I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] All right, so in our last Nugget, we saw how that we might be using something like a colocation service. This is before we get into the cloud, of course. But we might be using something like that in order to expand our own requirements for data, for storage, for computing power, and that sort of thing. This can also be done, by the way, because maybe in our building, we're just out of space in our data center. We don't have room for any more server racks.

0:31Or it might be difficult to put in additional equipment to support them, such as UPSes, Uninterruptible Power Supplies, gigantic batteries, basically, other power generators, all kinds of other infrastructure we might need. Well, here we can lease space out of a data center. Now, this is not a Microsoft data center. But this is just an example of one. I licensed some images from an organization that so I could show these. And you can see here, there's a little bit of a reflection on the glass. So you can't really see everything here. But there's hard drives, it looks like down here.

1:03That looks like a seven by five. That's 35 hard drives probably right there. Usually, your power supplies are lower to the bottom. There's probably some CPUs in the middle here somewhere, some basically computers, some servers, maybe some network equipment up in here, switches or-- I don't know-- whatever. I can't really see it very well through that reflection. But anyway, it looks like there's more storage up here, more hard drives up here. So that kind of gives you a picture of the layout of how this might look. They don't all look that same way. By the way, this is one of the most beautiful data centers I've ever seen.

1:37If you ever see Microsoft's data centers inside-- and we might be able to get a look at one later on-- they're nowhere near this sexy. Can I say the word "sexy"? As long as it's about IT? OK. All right. Anyway, this is what one of them might look like. Then here's just another big data center. I think this is actually an artist rendition. This does not look 100% real to me. But it gives you the idea there. And then here's one right here as well. Again, you can see all kinds of hard drives down here. This looks like computers through here, some servers, more hard drives up here at the top.

2:11This one's a little unusual in that it doesn't follow the straight aisle. It's got this rounded-- it looks like maybe it's on a spaceship or something. I don't know. It's the Millennium Falcon's data center. OK, that's great. We see what some data centers might look like, at least get a concept of how they look and what they operate like. But where is Microsoft's data center? Well, it's not in just one location. That's why it's kind of called the cloud, because it is more nebulous. You can't attach it to a single location. We're talking mostly about Microsoft 365, I understand, in this course, obviously.

2:44However, Microsoft 365 involves many other services that we don't always directly touch upon or look at. One of those is Microsoft 365. So again, there's kind of a tendency to say, OK, well, where are the Microsoft 365 data centers? I don't know. I do know, and I don't know. I know that they're dispersed everywhere. OK, so the cloud-- the data centers are really distributed worldwide. There are over 160 data centers that Microsoft has in over 140 countries.

3:16And it's growing all the time. This is just the most recent data that I could find on it. So my Microsoft 365 resources-- I live in Phoenix. So there's a new data center here in Phoenix called West 3. Yeah, Microsoft's never imaginative with the names they give things. I live in the Western United States. They just decided to create one called West 3 there. There's another West. I don't remember which one it is. But there's another West in the Los Angeles area. And I can't remember where the second West is. Anyway, my 365 resources, I requested that they be placed in West 3 because that's in Phoenix.

3:52And it's in my area. But I still couldn't point to the exact data center. They may have multiple data centers in the Phoenix area. But I still don't know exactly which server or exactly which rack my Microsoft 365 resources are on. If I have storage that I'm leasing there, I don't know where that storage is. I don't know which hard drive it's on. And I really don't have to. But it is a paradigm shift, because if you're used to hands on in the data center, installing your own hard drives, replacing your own hard drives when they fail, installing your own servers there, and everything like that, you don't do that in Microsoft 365.

4:27And in fact, good luck trying to get into one of the data centers. I did a virtual tour through a virtual meeting. This was about a month ago. And they were very guarded with what they would allow you to even look at really. I mean, they would show it to us, really, because that's part of the point of it. So we could kind of get an idea of what it all looked like. But we were strictly told not to record or take photographs of anything that we saw. Now, let's move on though. I'm going to give you a little bit more details about this. All of those data centers are connected by networks. Remember, in our previous slide here, this one right here, remember, we had these WAN links.

5:02And we didn't really name them. But these network connections that go between our offices, those are called WAN links-- Wide Area Network. Well, Microsoft has a ton of wide area network links between all of their various data centers and resources. In fact, there's 165,000 miles of fiber optic, which is at this point the fastest kind of network you can get-- of fiber optic and subsea networking. Yes, they actually have a networking point that goes from, if I remember right-- it's from the coast of Virginia somewhere over into northern Spain.

5:38It goes all the way across the ocean that way. If you're familiar with network speeds, you have kilobits per second, megabits per second, gigabits per second. These network fiber optics that they have can run at 1.6 petabits per second regionally. That's just super fast. Now, part of the reason why I'm telling you all this is because I want you to understand that Microsoft resources are more than enough for really just about anybody. You're not going to exhaust Microsoft's resources.

6:10Now, you might exhaust your pocketbook because it does get expensive as you get into the higher echelons of this. But that's a different topic for a different day. And Microsoft does also have consultants that they can offer to you to help you kind of budget that stuff out. Overall, it's usually cheaper though than doing it all yourself locally. They serve over a billion customers-- wow, a billion customers-- and 20 million companies. Again, these are also growing. They service and comply with over 90 compliance requirements.

6:42These are things like if you're in the health care industry and you need to store your data in Microsoft's cloud, and you're paying for some storage there, for example, well, you would have HIPAA requirements there, right? As you know, HIPAA is going to protect the privacy of your data. In different countries, they have equivalents of that. There's also financial compliances that have to be observed, for example. Microsoft provides a billion dollars annually just in the security investment here, just to secure all of this and to improve their security.

7:13They have Microsoft Defender, which of course is on your local machines. But it's really much bigger than that. And it really goes even into their data centers. They have artificial intelligence and machine learning to, within moments, detect new threats on the internet, for example. Also, Microsoft uses approximately 70% of their energy from renewable energy. Now, part of the advantage of that is not just that it's environmentally responsible but also that over time, we hope at least, that that will be less expensive than paying for power from a utility company.

7:46So chances are that most major organizations are paying for their power from a utility company. And we probably don't have 70% in most organizations. So if we can transfer some of our load over to Microsoft's cloud, Microsoft 365, azure, some of their other resources, we can take advantage of that renewable energy that they offer. Not only might it be more responsible, but it could also be a cost savings over time, especially when you compare it with other cost savings that you can take advantage of in Microsoft's cloud.

8:16Now, the other thing that I'm pretty excited about really is this-- underwater data centers. Yes, underwater data centers. They also have some space infrastructure, which we might look at in a future Nugget. It's mostly related to networking. But the underwater data centers, let me show those to you. Here's the website. I'll try to remember to put a link here so you can access this on your own if you want. The article is a couple of years old. But they took this tube. It's the size of like a small submarine, I guess. The dimensions are on here somewhere. I just don't remember how long it is. But you can see here that it was under the ocean for two years off the coast of Scotland.

8:50And you can see it got all kinds of barnacles and things on it. What they do is they have server racks in there. And they slide out on some rails. And they replace the oxygen that's in there with nitrogen because, apparently, it's better for the long-term life of the electronic components in there. Obviously, there's no staff under there. This is completely unmanned, if you will, on the bottom of the ocean. They can also take advantage of the cooling effect of the ocean. It's very cold in the ocean. And therefore, they don't have as high a burden to pay for air conditioning and that sort of thing.

9:24I don't know how they circulated the cool through there, but they did it somehow. Scrolling down, you can see there's a good YouTube on there to get a little bit more of a perspective of what the whole thing looks like here. There's also another one that's being dropped off another coast somewhere. I can't remember where it is. That one will be under ocean, from what I've heard, for three years. You can see they're blowing off all the barnacles that are on this thing. Look, there's a bird on there. The bird is not the property of Microsoft, by the way. Anyway, so we keep going on down here. And you can see here, this is where they take the cap off of it.

9:54And they will slide this out on these rails like you can see right here. I think I can actually open this up in another page. Yeah. You can see it slides out on these rails. These are all the servers that they have down there. It's actually connected to a giant power cable that powers the whole thing. And it was under ocean for two years. I don't remember the statistic, but I think they said something like it would fail one fifth as much-- the various components would fail one fifth as much as a data center on land. Part of that is because there's not a human in there replacing parts and jostling things around.

10:27I guess the human effect is really quite significant. Oh, here's another picture that I find quite interesting. This gives you a little bit of a sense of scale. Something about this photograph reminds me of the amount of closet space my wife gives me. Anyway, also, look at this. I don't know if you see this. Are any of you OCD? Check that out. That sticker was stuck on that server crooked for two years on the ocean floor. Could someone not have straightened that out? All right, so that gives you some idea of the resources that Microsoft has available for their cloud.

10:58Stick around for the next Nugget, where we're going to be discussing really where the cloud is and the various locations that Microsoft offers. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] All right. We've been discussing the cloud in various aspects. One of the things though, that's still a little undefined is where actually is all of this stuff, right? So for example, if we take a look at this slide show that I've been running, this is stored right now on my local computer. It is stored in a file location on my drive. Actually, it's a SSD drive. But anyway, there's one of-- there's the first slide I showed you when I did this presentation.

0:30Here's one of the data centers, a couple of the data centers that we looked at. And I think I finished with this slide in our last Nugget that we recorded here. But guess what? It's not really just stored here. It's also stored in Microsoft Cloud. And the advantage to that is number one, if my computer blows up, which it's happened, then I still have this PowerPoint presentation up in Microsoft's Cloud. And by the way, whenever I make a change, look at this, just keep an eye on this up where my mouse pointer is right now, where it says saved.

1:01If I just make any simple change to this, watch how long it takes for it to save this document. I don't actually have to click the Save button. It just does it automatically when I store Microsoft Office documents, and I'm also using OneDrive, which is Microsoft's Cloud solution for storage. So watch, if I just type something in here, watch how soon it says it's saving it. Usually it happens faster than this. And now it's making a liar out of me. Finally, it took like eight or nine seconds. Usually, that just happens almost instantly.

1:31I'm OK with eight or nine seconds. And it's also the fact that it saves it as I go. You might get excited working on something and you might have been working on it for an hour and forgot to save any of it. And then it crashes or your computer blows up or the power goes out or something like that. Well now you've lost it, all right. Not now, not when we have OneDrive, which is kind of a solution because I don't have to think of hitting that Save button all the time. It just doesn't for me, both locally and in OneDrive. And in fact, let me just close this.

2:02Here it is. I'm just going here to office.com. There up at the top, you see that. And once you log in then you have access to all of your documents right here. You can see I've got what is that OneNote, PowerPoint, Excel, stuff like that. Here's that slideshow were just working with. I can open that. And let's say that I even forgot it or something like that, I left it at home and I went to make a presentation, all I need is a tablet, some device, and I can just connect to my cloud account and I have this slide presentation right here.

2:34And I can start to present this right now. And you can see all the rest that I've got here. Again, the last slide that I showed and all of that. Now the next thing that sometimes people are concerned about is they want to know exactly where their data is stored. Well, you're probably never going to know that exactly, especially down to the last hard drive or something like that. You can know in general terms though. For example, you don't have to memorize this because you might not go here in your normal administration for Microsoft 365. But it doesn't hurt to know about it. It's at admin.microsoft.com.

3:05Once I log in with the privileged account here, then I can go down here to Settings. And look at this. If I go to org settings, which is where I am right now, then I could go into-- what is it? Organization profile. And it tells me where some of my data is stored. Look right there, data location. And it says right there as part of our transparency principles, we publish location where Microsoft stores your customer data. Where is it stored? In the United States of America. Thank you for that level of transparency, Microsoft.

3:36What does that mean? East Coast, West Coast, Kentucky? Is it Hawaii, Alaska? Who knows. But it's OK. I'm all right with it for myself because for the Microsoft 365 kind of data, it could be stored anywhere in the United States those particular items. There are some things, by the way, a lot of other things, really, that you can specify from a high level as an administrator. I can say when I first set up my Azure tenant where I'm located or where I want the data to be. If I create something like a virtual machine, which we'll look at a little bit later on, that virtual machine, I can say I want that to be stored in the Eastern part of the United States, in the Western part of the United States, in South Africa.

4:18You can pick and choose those things. But as a general rule Microsoft does a great job of knowing where you are and localizing the data as best they can. And then let me just give you another quick example of that same thing. Here you can see my Windows 11 desktop. I just installed this, might have been a couple of weeks ago or something like that. And I haven't really done a lot with it. But you can see here that I have gotten Microsoft Office installed here. You can see there's links or shortcuts here for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, the whole thing. I can launch those if I want to right here.

4:50The thing is this installation of Windows 11 does not actually exist in my office. I work in a home office. It doesn't exist on my hard drive, on my computer that's right down here underneath my desk, doesn't exist there. Where does it exist? At this IP address. So you can see right up here. I'm actually using a remote desktop to connect to this. It's 20.106.73.65. I do happen to know that's in the West US West three data center from Microsoft, which is probably 30 or 40 miles to the West of me, Southwest of me.

5:22And the reason why I know it's there is because I told it to create it there when I first created this virtual machine. But this, again, shows some of the benefit of using the cloud. What if I worked for a pretty poor school district and sadly many school districts are very poor. And we had to buy a bunch of used computers for our staff, they barely run Windows 10. And they're maxed out on memory, the motherboards won't take anymore. They got two gigabytes of memory and the bare minimum hard drive space, a very basic processor.

5:56They don't have other things that you need for an upgrade like to Windows 11. So Windows 11 would require at least a dual core processor or at least 4 gigs of RAM, a certain amount of hard disk space, can't remember off the top of my head how much. But it needs more hard drive space. Regardless, the point I'm making there is maybe those old machines don't have things like that or a TPM, Trusted Platform Module, which you also need for Windows 11. So that poor school district, if it turns out that for maybe they have an application that needs to run with Windows 11, we just bought all of these computers used, we used every last penny we had and now we can't install Windows 11.

6:32And we really need to have it. I guess it's time to have a bake sale. So what are they going to do? Well, what they could do is exactly what you're seeing me do here, this installation of Windows 11, I could be running that on a really old crusty installation of Windows 8, Windows 10. I could be running it on barely enough memory or anything like that, just enough to run that host operating system is what we call it. And I'm remotely connecting over the network over to Microsoft's data center to open this up. When I click on the Start menu, that's not happening on my computer, that's happening whatever it is.

7:0540 miles away from me right now. But I can see it all right here. And I can interoperate with just about everything here in this remote connection the same is if I were actually using this as an installed operating system on my local hard drive under my disk right now. And as I minimize this, this is my actual desktop right here. That's my actual physical desktop that appears on my own drive right here. Now then the next stuff I'm going to show you here is not stuff you have to memorize again by any means. I just want you to get again, the concept, the scope, the advantages of how all of this works.

7:39It's actually very cool. So here we have things like availability zones. When you get into higher levels of Microsoft Cloud and you work with Azure, for example, you will need to have certain critical company infrastructure, certain critical company applications, databases, file storage all that kind of stuff on one of Microsoft's data centers. Maybe it's this right here, which would be one or more data centers. They might be two or three data centers that are linked together over very high speed connectivity. And they're probably not too far away geographically speaking.

8:11Well, if that whole region goes down because of an earthquake or something like that or a natural disaster or a zombie apocalypse, well, guess what? We have all of our data that could still be available in at least one or two other zones that we see right here. And these might be geographically further away. This might be in Phoenix. This might be, I think there's another data center in the Los Angeles area. There's another one in I guess Washington State. So we can separate those out so that they're also further apart geographically speaking so that they can also escape a local natural disaster or something like that.

8:47And if it's something that did affect the whole West Coast, for example, or the whole west region, we could even have our geography set up so that we have a disaster recovery site in the Eastern United States. All of this stuff, by the way, my data when I save it maybe to this location or something, it's milliseconds, before it's stored and replicated to other locations when I configure it that way. You can see here, I don't know if it's too small to read or not, but there's fiber that connects a lot of these availability zones.

9:19Fiber is extremely, extremely fast. So again, that's just to give you the concept. Here also is a website that I'm going to show you right up here at the top. You can Google for that if you want to. It's not a Microsoft site. But I think it's pretty cool. And you can just click and drag around here and Zoom in on your various regions. So for example, here I am in Phoenix. Microsoft is not 100% transparent about all of their data centers. Some of them, they're deliberately kind of sly about because they are government locations. For example, I found one in some deep searches in Nevada that's a government site.

9:53There's also another one actually just North of Phoenix here, I think it might be in Camp Verde right up here, doesn't show up on this map, that's a Department of Defense server up there. Again, for obvious reasons, they try not to be very transparent about those. They want to keep it a secret. I don't know what happened to my pointer here. It looks like it got barbecued or something like that. But anyway, I just want to show you this website, infrastructuremap.microsoft.com right up here. This is actually kind of interesting as well. Again, you don't have to memorize everything you see here or anything like that. This is for extra credit, if you will.

10:24Just to get an idea of how all this works out geographically speaking. So I could click down here, for example, to explore the globe. Down here it says you can even take a tour of Azure space, they have stuff in space that's going on right now. Anyway, let me Zoom in here. See West US three, that's where most of my data is stored. And sure enough, there's the skyline here in Phoenix. And I can click on Learn More about that particular location if I want. Also down here at the bottom, this is cool. I would recommend you do this as well, just for giggles. Take a virtual tour of a Microsoft data center.

10:57And I'm not going to do all of this because you can do this yourself, but you can even enter through the lobby here. I'm going to explore this lobby, shows you what it looks like. It shows you the security that you have to go through. There's a security checkpoint right there. You can go into their ops center, their operations room. As we explore this, you can see they have lots of colorful pie charts and graphs up on the wall. Who doesn't want that? We can go into the server room right here as well. I had to go to the mechanical area first before I got here. But we can see a little bit about how this looks. We can look at it a little bit more at Microsoft's server blades.

11:29These are the actual servers. We can click and drag through these. This one has a bunch of disks in it. That's what JBOD means, just a bunch of disks. That's one example of a blade. Here's another one here. This one is a compute blade. So it's going to have processors and memory on it. By the way, just as a quick note, I found this out when I did a tour of Microsoft's data center. The leader of the tour said that Microsoft doesn't buy any of their servers off the shelf. They custom design their servers. And then they contract out whoever Dell, HP, Lenovo, I think they named another company too, which I can't remember right now, but they contract those out and they custom build those for Microsoft.

12:07Anyway, that stuff that I saved, my PowerPoint presentation, it might be on one of these disks in this JBOD blade. But that's kind of fun to go through. Also I'll just refer you to this as well. This is a YouTube location here. You can make note of that URL, or you can Google for "Story Labs 360 Inside a Microsoft Server Room" here. And this actually is pretty cool as well. I don't want to play the whole thing. Once you scan ahead through here, I'm just going to show you what the inside might look like. These are all the blades that they have. You can see they have artificial intelligence, machine learning, compute blades, this stuff's all pretty cool.

12:41And then as I've said before, Microsoft is not the only provider of cloud services. Here we have Google. They've made available a gallery, photo gallery of their data centers here. They are a little more transparent than Microsoft can be on this sometimes. But wow, look at this. These things are beautiful. Microsoft doesn't put much effort into making them as beautiful as these, but hey, they get the job done, right? I guess that's the most important part. But they have LED lighting in Google's data centers. And they will change color depending upon their condition. So I'm not sure what all their color scheme is, but I'm assuming if something turned red in here, that would be maybe overheating or some other kind of a problem that might be occurring in that particular data center.

13:19But there you have it. I just wanted to expand again, the scope of what we're talking about when we're talking about the cloud, where our data is stored, where maybe even our operating system is stored and how available it is to us. I hope this has been informative for you. I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[MUSIC PLAYING] My wife owns a furniture store. And they refurbish furniture. Old furniture, and make it look really fashionable and new, and it looks great and everything. But part of the job there is, they have to actually use a lot of paper towels for things. For cleaning up old furniture. For all kinds of things. Putting on different varnishes, I guess. I don't know what they do. Anyway, I don't get at all. It's way out of my wheelhouse. But one of the things she asked me for was-- I told her, I said, I'm going by the store, do you want me to pick something up for you?

0:34And she said, yes, I need paper towels. So I could get this. It's $5.48 for these two roles, is what it amounts to. And it says $0.03 each. I don't know if that's for each little section or whatever. But you get the idea, right? That's how much it costs. And then take a look at this one. If I would buy more at once in this economy of scale, is what this is. Look. Now, I've got $0.02 each instead of $0.03 each. So it's only 2/3 of the expense, is if I go this way.

1:05Now, you might be asking, what does all of this have to do with a server? Well, economy of scale, still. So for example, you see Microsoft. When they set up a data center, they're going to buy lots of acres of land. The one that's near me, about 40 miles away, I think there's, like, 270 acres or something like that they bought. So they're going to get lower prices for everything, starting with the land. They get more incentives from local governments to build there, because they want the jobs that it brings, and the other resources that it brings.

1:35A lot of political talking points possibly there. But it's all there. And Microsoft is going to get lower costs because of those sorts of things. Then when it comes to the actual hardware that they buy, they're going to get lower prices on things such as, oh, the servers themselves. They have their servers custom made, but they'll still probably get them at a pretty cut rate compared to if we were trying to buy a server of the same type, because they're buying hundreds, if not thousands of those servers. I might need two or three servers, depending on the size of my business.

2:07How about hard drives? Just the components themselves. There was a data center on the West Coast-- this is a few years back-- that someone was telling me about. They had a catastrophic cooling problem. The inside of that data center got up to, if I remember right, 140 degrees, and ruined a lot of equipment, starting, really, with the hard drives. A lot of the hard drives failed. By the way, when I took tour of Microsoft's data center about a month ago, the leader of the tour was asked the question, how many hard drive failures do you have per day?

2:37And he said hundreds of failures. And he was thinking of a specific data center. So in one data center, hundreds of hard drive failures per day. But anyway, if you have a bunch of hard drives fail, like in that disaster I told you about, or if you're Microsoft, whatever-- if you're buying lots of hard drives, you're going to get a lot cheaper deal per hard drive than when we buy them 5, 10 at a time. We're paying closer to a retail expense. How about energy costs? We talked about utilities already, but maybe energy costs.

3:09Remember, Microsoft is up to 70%, at the time of this recording-- that's supposed to be a 7. 70% Renewable energy right now. And presumably, if we subscribe to all the talking points about renewable energy, it should wind up being less expensive in the long run than paying for utility that's delivered from a power company using conventional methods. Also, Microsoft can afford to build renewable energy, solar wind farms, things like that, that most companies would never do.

3:40So they can afford to invest in it, which will then in the long run, hopefully, save them money as well. Well, we can also benefit from that if we're using any of their services. And you get the idea of the rest of it. CPU, the cost of their land. All the rest of it is going to be less for Microsoft than it would be for you or me. And all of those things add up to dollars that then get passed on to us as the customers. So in the long run, it may actually be cheaper for us, instead of buying our own servers in certain instances, and our own storage, to just use Microsoft's.

4:12Because we can just use a slice of all of these things that we're talking about here, and come out at a great savings very often. So economies of scale may be another reason why many organizations could move to Microsoft Cloud, and hopefully save some money. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[MUSIC PLAYING] A big part of most organizations budget is IT. It's very expensive to run IT. And so we need to consider ways that we can save money, or at least, make our dollars more efficient when it comes to spending those dollars. So let's say, for example, that we have a bobblehead company. You know, those bobbleheads. A lot of times, you see them for sports figures and all. They got a big gigantic head on top of a little smaller body, and it kind of shakes on a spring like this.

0:32That's my best imitation. Anyway. What happens is, maybe we are advertising our bobbleheads for some really famous football players during Super Bowl. And so during most of the year-- our fiscal year starts in April. So, April, May, June, all the other months through here. And then in February, we show our ad during the Super Bowl, and we put it in print and all kinds of things. So through February, and probably March, we're expecting our sales to go like this. They go this way.

1:02And then all of a sudden in February, they go way up here. Well, we did the same thing during World Cup for soccer, which is the other version of football. It's not as good as American football. I'm going to start some fights here, aren't I? Anyway. So we did the same thing for soccer, with Messi, and we had some other bobbleheads that we sold. And it crashed our servers. And so we told our management, we said, hey, this year for Super Bowl, we can't have the same thing that happened with the World Cup. We've got to get our servers upgraded.

1:34We've got to buy new servers-- at least one new server that can handle the load. And so this is one of the things that I do. I like to go to websites like HP, or Dell, or other server manufacturers, and look at how much servers cost. Now this is just a middle of the road server. It's a rack based server from PowerEdge. And this might be one of the things we might want to buy to help handle our bobblehead demand. Look. The starting price is 10 grand. Now for those of you that work with servers a lot, you'll say, yeah, that's pretty cheap. But for a lot of us, that looks expensive, at least at the outset.

2:05But look. I have to add a lot of other stuff to this. First of all, I have to add an operating system. I have to add hard drives. I have to add memory I have to add a processor. So by the time I get done with it-- I'm not going to show all the details here. But I've just added a few things, and I'm up at $23,000. And these can get very, very expensive. So let's say that I convinced my management to buy this $23,000 server. I had to buy lots of lunches for people, and I had to go through the seventh circle of hell and everything, to be able to get approval to get this server.

2:40So now we have our $23,000 server. And it's handling this demand just fine. It was a success. We're glad we bought it. But when it comes back around to April, May, June, the rest of the year, what's that server doing? It's just sitting there with this level of demand, and it's way too much server for the demand that we have during those months. It's kind of overkill for those months. Well, this was what we call a capital expenditure, or CapEx.

3:10So that's where you spend all your money up front. We had to buy this big, gigantic server. We spent a lot of money on it. But if we're not using it, or if it's just sitting here burning gas, we don't get a refund on it. We can't call Dell, and say, hey, Dell, we're only using about 25% of that server you sold me. So can you send me 75% of the price back. They're not going to do that. Also, the value of this will start to trickle down. Because of depreciation. You can write some of that off in taxes and stuff. But it'll trickle down.

3:41And someday, we might even be able to sell it as a used server, or recycle it. But it's only going to be a fraction of what we originally paid for it. So that's another disadvantage. Now compare that to something else, another kind of an expenditure called an operational expenditures, or an OpEx. This is what we do when we use something like Azure. So with Azure, we can say, hey, we're just going to use the server that we have in-house for now. But during this peak period of demand, we're going to add in a virtual machine in Microsoft Azure.

4:13And that virtual machine is going to be able to handle all of this load. And then when we're done using that virtual machine, and our demand comes back down again, we'll just either stop using the server, or we can change the sizing of the server. That's for another day. But the other thing you can do with this is can keep that same Azure server all year round if you want, and it can shrink in terms of its total size and expense for what you're not using. And then when it increases in demand like this-- it can scale up or scale out, is what we call it.

4:43And it can add more resources, add more memory, add more CPU, or add additional servers entirely. And then of course, your expense goes up, but then you've also kept up with the demand. But during the off season, so to speak, over here, it's not just burning gas and costing you money unnecessarily, or at least as much. It's much, much more efficient. So operational expenses, it's kind of like leasing something. You don't actually pave the whole expense of the item. If you lease a car, you don't spend $80,000 on the car.

5:14You pay some each month, and it's not going to add up to $80,000 at the end of your lease contract. Similarly, we're just paying for what we use with Azure and the resources that it offers. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.