Understanding Local vs Cloud Solutions

0:00All right, let's take a look here at the Microsoft Cloud for Windows Server Administrators course. This, of course, will emphasize mostly Microsoft's Azure product and all of the products that are underneath that umbrella, but there are other good cloud products out there as well, particularly from Amazon Web Services or AWS, as we usually refer to it. But I do want to point out this, as well as several other courses, are kind of spokes that come off of the main wheel or the hub. That hub is another course that's the foundation for all of this.

0:30The name is really long, and I have to always look at it. Windows Server Administration, Core Infrastructure for Enterprise IT. Okay, so that is kind of the core, and it is designed to take you from more of an entry level in IT into further areas. So maybe you've been working at the help desk for a couple of years, and maybe you're getting kind of tired of it. I mean, help desk is great for some people. I have a good friend of mine, one of my best friends, that's managed help desk for more than 20 years, and that's just kind of where he's lived, and he's good with it.

1:01But some people would rather move into further and other areas of IT, like managing servers, working at a data center, being a network administrator of some kind. So this is what's going to kind of help you move into some of those other areas. So off of that core course, which I just mentioned, we have other courses as well. There's one on security, which I actually haven't recorded yet, but I will. Then there's this one, which is focused mostly on cloud. We have other ones that are focused mostly on things like Active Directory, networking, and the like.

1:31So what we're going to do here is to take a look, first of all, in the very next video, by taking a look at working with on-premises servers and devices and everything else that goes along with it, and comparing that to cloud management and seeing how we can make that transition throughout this course.

0:00All right, let's take a look here at on-prem versus cloud management. Now, I may have mentioned in various spoke topics from our core course here that we're going to be moving to the cloud somehow or another. Most organizations are at least partially involved in the cloud. Now, I went to a conference a few months back, and there were a lot of Microsoft representatives there and Microsoft speakers and stuff. And at a certain point, one of the MVPs for Azure was speaking, and he's a super knowledgeable guy. He's from England, but I think he lives in Ireland.

0:33Anyway, he asked for a raise of hands for people that were pretty significantly involved in Microsoft's cloud, which we'll use as an umbrella term. We'll just call it Azure. It's kind of an umbrella that holds a lot of the other services that Microsoft offers. Well, surprisingly, many hands went up, but not all. There were several hands for enterprise organizations that still had not really migrated to the cloud, at least in any significant way. I don't think that's going to stay that way. In fact, Microsoft's stated goal that they made at the same conference was that they would prefer that people move off of on-prem, of course, because, well, Azure's kind of their cash cow now, but they would prefer that people move off of that locally and on-premises Active Directory and stuff like that into the cloud. Now, there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one, you can kind of maybe mistrust the motive a little bit.

1:26Azure is Microsoft's current cash cow. It started off with operating systems like Windows, and then there's always been some cash there, I guess, and then they moved to Office, and that, for many years, was their cash cow. That's where they really pulled in a lot of income. Now, it's moved to cloud. Once you move things into the cloud, you're kind of a lifetime customer for Microsoft, and you're really tethered to that cloud in significant ways, and that's where they make a lot of their money. Now, to be fair to Microsoft, it's also probably going to save you money as opposed to doing things all on-premises. A lot of it also relates to practical reasons and simplifying administration when we compare on-premises versus cloud management. So, first of all, we have servers, all right? Now, let's go back to this. So, there's a data center behind me there, and there's, looks like, I can't really see all because there's some reflections on the glass and stuff, but there are lots of different kinds of servers in this data center.

2:23This is probably a co-location site. Not many organizations have big data centers like this behind me, or they might only have a portion of that. Many organizations will just lease, maybe, I don't know, this rack right here. That might be your rack right there in a co-location facility, but you're still responsible for all the hardware in that rack. You're responsible for connecting it all up, managing it, managing what data is there, all the other stuff you would have done if that were in your own local data center, or that might be your data center. You might just be an enterprise or a large government organization that just requires a lot of data center. So, in other words, you're still responsible for managing all your servers.

3:07You know where the server is. You know where your switches are. You know where your storage is. You know where your, I'm not sure what that is right there, but you know where your pizza box servers are. That's what we call really thin little servers. They're about the size of a pizza box. Nobody knows more about pizza boxes than IT people, right? So, you might have a pizza box server here, and you can walk up to it and put hands on all of that, and we even get kind of defensive about it. So, if someone gets near our servers, we're like, what are you doing over there? That's not your server. It's not our server either. We just work for the company, right?

3:40But we have a lot of personal investment in that, in the effort we've put into it, in the configurations we've made, all of that kind of stuff. So, we kind of stand guard like she is in front of our data center server racks. Thing is, though, that gets to be kind of expensive, doesn't it? In fact, there's a lot of reasons why using your own servers, although we get full control of everything, sometimes it gives us responsibility that we don't really have to bear or expenses that we don't really have to bear. So, not always, but in general, if you move from on-premises into Microsoft's cloud, which again, we kind of collectively call Azure, much if not most of the time, that will save you money. Now, why is that? Well, a lot of that's just from the physical presence. So, if you have your own rack here, you have to power it. You have to pay the, you know, there's probably some kind of insurance that you have to maintain for it.

4:36You have to have personnel that can manage it, that can troubleshoot if something's going wrong locally here, or to replace a switch, or to replace, you know, failed hard drives, or, you know, these might be, I don't think there's any of those are UPSs, but to replace power supplies or any of the other kind of equipment that might be down there. Well, we've got to do all of that. Whereas if you move all that into the cloud, that's Microsoft's responsibility. Also, this could even apply to some degree to desktop computers. So, you can use something called Windows 365, and I won't get into all the details of that, but the short version is, you might be in a scenario where you don't want to have to go from workstation to workstation to upgrade each workstation. And yes, there's automated ways to do that. You can use system center and a lot of other products and solutions to upgrade a bunch of desktops. But a budget is always a significant consideration there. If you have to upgrade all of the operating systems, that involves time, personnel, personnel hours, time away from other projects, and significantly, potentially hardware upgrades. You might be running Windows, I don't know, 10 machines that don't have, that were only spec'd out for maximum Windows 10 capability. Now you're on

5:52Windows 11, and you might have to move to 64-bit processors. You might have to upgrade the memory, the RAM. You have to upgrade maybe the storage. Many of those might not have a trusted platform module, which is good for additional security. Now you have to get another motherboard, really, pretty much on another computer. Well, you can actually, I opened the webpage here, so let me go show it to you. For desktops, you can put Windows 365, make that your PC in the cloud. Oh, look, there's somebody behind me trying to chat with me. No, thank you. Anyway, you can take older hardware, or you can have your users working at home or remotely or something like that, and you can even connect from a Mac PC or a Mac device. So I could actually use this from my MacBook Pro, for example, and I could connect to a full Windows desktop, managed by my company and paid for by my company, if there's a subscription for it, and basically just make a remote desktop connection to it, and it's virtually the same as if you were locally connected. The user experience is really not that much different.

6:54So in that respect, it's not really a server-ish topic, it's really more of a desktop topic, but it still does relate to servers because what we've done in the past is we've set up our own remote desktop gateways, remote desktop systems, might be Microsoft products, might be third-party products to make all of that happen. But again, it's an additional burden. How about applications? You know, most applications nowadays have a web app version or they've moved entirely to a web app version. Likewise, I've owned several small businesses, and in the past, when I first got started, I got QuickBooks. That is kind of the small to medium-sized business accounting software that we would use to track our expenses and stuff like that.

7:37Well, I used to, again, also install that from shiny media, in other words, from a DVD, and it was installed locally. And then I had one installation from my MacBook, another installation from my Windows device, and some things did not always match up exactly between the two platforms. Well, that's one of the advantages now for taking applications and making them web apps instead, okay? Because QuickBooks then moved to a cloud-based solution where we no longer had to install the software. We would just go to the website, log in, and whether you're on a Mac, PC, Linux, anything with a browser, you pretty much get the same experience, same patch level, same consistency and everything. And that, again, is something that has moved to the cloud. Now, how does that relate to us as IT administrators? Well, first of all, it takes a burden off us. We don't have to install and make sure that the patch level is the same on every single installation we have across our environment for Salesforce or whatever the product is that you're installing there. So many applications now are web-based, web apps.

8:41By the way, I can't leave out of that discussion what we used to call Office, Microsoft Office, then it became Microsoft 365, which is also easily confused with Microsoft's licensing products. But anyway, we'll get into that later on. So all of that now, you can still install locally, that's definitely an option. But if you find yourself at a browser, but you realize, uh-oh, I don't have Office installed here, you can connect to the web app version and get most of the same functionality. There's very little that most people would notice different on the web app version compared to a locally installed version. Also, let's take a look at things like network equipment. When you take a look at network equipment, there's a lot of different things you can do with that. You could split that up into VLAN 1 over here and VLAN 2 over here, a lot of different configurations, management systems. You may have a separate networking group that handles all of that, or maybe you're kind of one person that does it all, and you're going to figure out everything. But when you move a lot of that into the cloud, to be fair, you may still have to configure certain things. You may have to still configure various, I don't know, subnets and network security considerations, and a lot of that kind of stuff. But a lot of that now is handled in the cloud. And if this server, if this rather switch fails, or it gets a bad port or something like that, well, it used to be that we would have

10:00to replace that. We would have to maintain it. We would have to get called in on the weekend when we're supposed to be out camping with the family and fix that. Now, Microsoft kind of handles all of that. You could actually have use of one of the switches in Microsoft's cloud, and if something goes bad with the hardware of it, you'll probably not even know it. Microsoft handles the failover and the hardware and all of that for us, and it's completely transparent for the most part for us. Also, there's the issue of just the data center itself.

10:31Data centers are expensive, and the full burden of what goes on in that data center rests with IT. Now, if you're a smaller organization, small to medium-sized business, you probably don't have a whole data center or this whole thing behind me here. You might just have a co-located rack that you're managing there instead that you've leased from a co-location facility, or you may have a server room, which very often, let's face it, a lot of times, those are not really optimized for full server loads. A lot of the server power you're going to need could be 220, very often is. Well, if you just got a wall outlet in there that's a 110 wall outlet, that's not much of a server room. You're going to have to figure something out. You have to bring in utility service to that new server room, which is for most office environments, they don't usually build a server room. They just build office space. It can be somewhat flexible.

11:24Yeah, you could bring an electrician in. They could put in a 220 panel, including all of the stuff you need to make that happen. But then again, that burden still goes to you. That still rests on you. You also have to have backup of some kind, whether it's a data center or a server room. You have to have UPSs. UPS would be not the delivery service, but that would be uninterruptible power supply. So those are usually battery powered power supplies that take over in case of a utility power failure. And it's usually transparent. Nobody even notices that the UPS has kicked in. It just continues to provide power to your devices. I don't mean the ones in the office cubicles. You might have something there too, but this is mostly thinking about servers and rack utility. Anyway, when it comes to all of that stuff, once again, we don't have to worry about that. Anything that we move, all of this stuff that we move into the cloud, kind of don't have to worry about it anymore. Do we still have to manage it? Yes. Are we still responsible for our own data? Yes. Are we still responsible for backing up? Yes. But guess what? Even the backup could be in the cloud. So also, I won't get into it right now too much, but for the most part, you will save money moving things into the cloud. Some things can get away from you. I've had that happen to myself before. I implemented a service at Microsoft that used, I think it was four SCUs,

12:41several compute units. And it was for a security purpose that I had for a different course that I was teaching. I only had it up for a few days. It was like 500 bucks. Well, that was fun to submit that expense report. So things can get away from you, but you just have to keep an eye on it. And there are certain ways that you can help to manage those costs, which I'll get into when I talk more specifically about setting up your own Azure tenant. So anyway, in summary, all of this stuff that we see here, a lot of it can be moved to the cloud. Not all of it sometimes. You're still going to probably have some degree of all of this on premises, but you can significantly whittle down going from possibly all of this to a smaller environment where you just have one rack or fewer racks and you're managing more in the cloud.

0:00Now, let's take a look at another significant driver for moving to Azure or really any Cloud solution, whether it's AWS or anything else. That is the comparison of capital expense versus operational expense. Capital expense simply relates to the hardware, the facilities, the physical stuff you can touch relating to a datacenter. Let's say that we don't have Cloud. We're not using the Cloud, we're not using Azure or anything else.

0:30We have our own datacenter down here, and we take a look at this, maybe we're in a certain kind of a business, that let's say it's even seasonal. For example, we just had the World Cup finish. This is the year 2026. It just finished up. I didn't really track that much of it to be quite honest, because I only follow real football, which is American football. Anyway, just kidding. I just made most of the world unhappy there, didn't I? Anyway, so let's say that during the World Cup, which I think it finished last month.

1:01I should do research before I actually start recording. Anyway, during that, let's just call it a summer, because I know what happened in the summer. This relates to time or in particular seasons, and this relates to dollar expenses. Let's say that we are a bobblehead company, sports memorabilia, bobbleheads, all kinds of novelty items, stuff like that. Well, during the World Cup for soccer, which is its proper name, our sales shoot way up.

1:32So during the normal-ish seasons, our sales were kind of down here somewhere. But then during World Cup season, it goes way up there, and we've got messy bobbleheads and all kinds of soccer stars, all kinds of bobbleheads going on and stuff like that, you know, where they kind of go blah, blah, blah, just like that. And yes, that's an actual representation of what they do. So anyway, during the last World Cup, which I guess it doesn't happen every year, like the Super Bowl does, we had a spike in sales as well back then, but our servers were not able to handle the load for all the orders we were receiving.

2:06So right at the start of the World Cup, bam, our servers went down. We had a huge outage here. It was a professional embarrassment. We were losing many thousands of dollars per hour, let's say, I don't know, tens of thousands of dollars per hour. We were down for several hours, probably resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses, plus lost customers that went to our competitors instead that we'll never get back because the next World Cup or the next sports things that they want to buy, they're probably just going to go to the company that was able to service them the first time rather than the company whose website was down, right?

2:41Who couldn't process orders or who lost our orders. So what do we do? Well, in IT, we care about our jobs. So one of the IT managers talked to the CIO and the CTO and the CEO and the whole C-suite. And he said, look, last World Cup, we lost a ton of money. What we need to do is to buy more servers, right? Now, in reality, any company should have more than one server anyway for handling this kind of load. But let's say that we just say, we need an additional server here.

3:14So they're able to talk the management, the C-suite into buying, let's just say another $30,000 server here. So now we have our original $30,000 server, let's say it is, and another one. So we're now two total $30,000 servers here. Thing is, it's great because it was able to avoid this situation where we had an outage at a certain time. Now we're able to drive our sales way up, we're able to keep up with the orders and everything. And you would think that everybody's happy, happy, right?

3:44However, maybe one of the executives, maybe your CIO or CTO, Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer, or somebody like that. They talk to you around this time, let's say that this is, I don't know, February or something. And they say, how much is that extra server we bought you? How much is that actually performing? And you might say, oh, you know what? It's only using about 15% of its total capacity. And they'll say, 15%? We spent $30,000 on that server. Are you wasting money for the company?

4:15Look at that, what a waste. Well, of course, that's a little short-sighted because really the whole purpose we bought it for was when we make most of our bread and butter during peak seasons. Well, what are we going to do about that? Can we go to HP or Dell or whoever we bought the server from and say, you know, we're really only using about 15% of that server's total capacity. So if you could just refund us the additional 85% we're not using it, you know, we'd sure appreciate it. It's kind of like when I go to a restaurant and I eat a steak and I only eat half of it. Do you think I could talk to the waiter and say, hey, you know what?

4:46Can you refund half of this steak? Because I only ate about half of it. No, that's not going to fly. Same thing happens with server hardware. So that my friends is the weakness in capital expense. You bought it, you keep it, you got to pay for it, you got to maintain it, insure it, staff for it, everything. Okay, that's capital expenditures. However, when it comes to something else like using a cloud product such as Azure, well, you can put probably the same resources on an Azure resource like a virtual machine, but here we're just worried about operational expense.

5:20That's mostly just having somebody on hand that knows the systems and they can manage them and service them. And really, again, we're not even putting hands on these servers. I've built many virtual machines in Azure. I have no idea where they're physically located. I know they're in West US3 because that's where I live and that's where I set them up, but Microsoft actually has several data centers here. I don't know which data center it's in. And even if I knew which data center it was in, I can't walk in and put hands on that server. In fact, somebody at Microsoft that manages the data center, they would probably, they would have to look up which blade my resources are actually on.

5:58So let's say that again, here we have our normal season here and then the world cup happens where we make our bread and butter. In an operational expense, you can do a couple of different things here. You can do what we call a scale up, which means that we get more CPU, more storage, more RAM. Oops, that's supposed to be RAM. Stuff like that as needed. So as soon as it starts to spike up, you can program it this way. Then as long as it's not just a brief little blip, you can tell it to increase your CPU, increase your storage, increase your RAM to keep up with customer demand.

6:35That's called scaling up. Okay, scaling up. You can also do a scale out. I'll just put it down here. You can also do a scale out, which just adds additional identical servers, for example. It just depends upon what your business needs are for that. So that's a big difference and a big driver between going with a capital expense where you have to pay for stuff that you're not really using plus the added burdens of all the hardware and resources or operational expense, where all you have to do is really kind of pre-configure your systems to scale up or scale out.

7:09This is out over here, by the way, scale out. This saves us all of this wasted resource right here that we would normally have spent during capital expenses. And now we only pay for what we actually use. Another way to look at that is kind of a car lease. So when you lease a car, you only pay for it for the time that you're using it. When you're done, you just turn the car in and you don't have to pay any extra for it. Or if you've never leased a car before, maybe you've leased an apartment. The lease is only for the time that you're there. You didn't buy the apartment, you're just leasing it.

7:41When you move out, you don't have to keep paying for it. Unless you left it a mess and you don't get your security deposit back.

0:00All right, so my goal in this particular video is going to be to kind of break that paradigm shift, if you will, from on-premises to the cloud. Let's start with on-premises here, okay? So let's say that, you know, this is your office building here. I'll just have three office buildings. This one's in Phoenix. I'll just put airport codes in here. Maybe this one's in Las Vegas, which is LAS. And then over here, let's say we have Albuquerque, which is ABQ, all right? So, you know, from the US, Phoenix, of course, is in the state of Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada, and then Albuquerque is in the state of New Mexico, all right?

0:33So these are our three main offices, maybe our main headquarters here in Phoenix, and maybe you've got a nice cushy corner office. That never happens in IT, but let's just assume that you're in this corner office right here, and that's where you perform all of your IT. Now though, where is your actual data center in Phoenix? And if you're going to go in a traditional kind of a sense, in a major office building, most of the time the data center is on the bottom floor here, okay? Why? It's easier for running utilities, it's easier for water supply if you need to have a water-based cooling or any other kind of water solutions, easier for fire suppression, easier for delivery of equipment.

1:11Some of that stuff you get delivered to a data center is huge. You might have generator, that's another thing. A big power generator is usually in the back of the building somewhere. Your chillers, your environmental controls, diesel-powered backup generators, all of that stuff's going to be, of course, on the ground floor in most cases. There is some, I did see a video once where there was an unusual case where they put big Caterpillar brand generators in a skyscraper up on one of the upper floors, and they had to be helicoptered in.

1:43That's a little bit of an unusual case. Usually it's ground floor oriented. Other things that you might have down there would be UPSs. Some of those UPSs is the size of a Volkswagen. They are incredibly heavy, and again, because of weight, load bearing, all that kind of stuff, ground floor, why did I erase all that? A ground floor is usually the best solution. All right, I think I put it all back. Okay, so when you're in your corner office up here administering everything that's in the data center down here on the ground floor, how are you doing that?

2:13Do you have to take the elevator or the stairs? Who am I kidding? I would always take the elevator. Do you have to take the elevator downstairs every time you want to administer something? No, most of the time, you're not even gonna be in the data center unless there's some hardware requirements for something that needs to be replaced or something like that. And in fact, most IT employees, just to be frank about it, usually don't spend a lot of time hands-on in a data center. Most of your IT responsibilities can be done remotely and usually are. So you're gonna usually perform all of your administration from your own cubicle or from your own office here remotely connecting to servers down in the data center.

2:53Now, let's take a look at what else could happen. You get these other branch offices open in Las Vegas. They have their own data center down here, okay? On the ground floor. Albuquerque, they have their own data center down here on the ground floor. I don't know why I'm drawing them in like that, but just to get the point, they're on the ground floor. But then as the organization grows and morphs and changes happen and maybe you get a merger going on where you have another company that you've mergered with, now you have additional resources. Maybe you have a couple of small companies over here that you absorbed.

3:24So now you've got their data center or even just if it's a server room that they might have. Now you have to manage those resources. How are you gonna do that? Again, probably remotely. Then it turns out that here in Phoenix, we've outgrown our data center. There is no more room for any racks. We would have to completely possibly retool a lot of stuff. We'd have to maybe bring in more backup generators, more chillers, all kinds of other stuff. Or we're just out of space. What are you gonna do? Well, that's where we move into a co-location facility.

3:54We usually just call them colos. This again is very likely probably what this is right here. Probably owned by a specific company. There's lots of different data center companies out there. I'm trying to think of the name of some, QTS. That's one of them. We have several of those actually in Phoenix. In the past two or three years, there've been four or five, maybe more data centers that have sprung up in the Phoenix area. Part of the reasons for that is because we have very little risk of natural disasters. There's no hurricanes, really no earthquakes to speak of.

4:27We do get these things called haboobs in the late summer, which are big walls of dust that overtake the whole city, but those aren't usually natural disasters. But anyway, so we run out of space. Now what are we gonna do? We're gonna go to this colo and we're gonna say, hey, we need to lease this rack right here, or we need to get some additional space for a data center in your co-location facility. So we ran out a couple of racks right down here, okay? Again, I don't know why I'm drawing that that way, but anyway, we run some space out there, lease some space.

5:01Then what do we have to do? We have to get into our little car and drive out to the data center with some people here, some employees, and we have to install stuff. We have to manage stuff. If something fails, we have to drive again, drive out back to that co-location center. They're usually all badged access and very high security and all that kind of stuff. But nevertheless, we have to make the trip for the maintenance of it, right? Now, the thing is, once again, on the day-to-day basis, where are we actually managing that rack of servers from? Our cubicle or our office here in the main building.

5:32Most of it's done remotely. Many of our employees who manage resources in that co-location center may never even get to that data center. They probably will never visit. They'll probably never go through the front door. They'll probably do most of their functions remotely there. So when you're at that stage, by the way, where you're managing everything, your Las Vegas office, your Albuquerque office, your co-location resources, your merged companies, guess what you're doing? You're already running a cloud. It's kind of just a private cloud, if you will. You're already doing everything remotely.

6:03And guess what? When you move into a Microsoft solution or any other vendor for cloud services, you're really doing the same thing. You can think of Azure, if this is Azure out here, that is one ginormous co-location facility, and you can do a lot of the same kind of management in the same kind of basic method.

0:00Now, here I'm going to go ahead and show you Microsoft's data centers in a global map. This is a Microsoft website. I will link this down below so that you can also peruse this if you will. Just look at this. It's actually pretty fascinating. Since Microsoft presence is probably mostly in the US, as well as in Europe, as you can see over here as I spin the globe around here. I don't know why they have this gray looking color and everything like that. It's like scorched earth or something like that. Anyway, some post-apocalyptic world, I guess.

0:32Anyhow, this is actually quite a lot of fun to explore around in and to see what is available. This will become important to you as you determine how you want to migrate into Azure and to Microsoft Cloud resources. This shows a lot of different things we can do with this. Actually, here's the zoom right down here. I'll try to zoom in a little bit. I guess that's as far as it lets me go. You can see that there's also a legend here for the various kinds of things that we have, like the geographies themselves, regions, some that are available now, some that are coming soon to a theater near you, network points of presence, and the sustainability projects.

1:10Microsoft's actually pretty big on the sustainability. I'm not going to get into all the details here, but it's really a Cloud topic on its own. Really, most of the Cloud is just data centers. You probably have heard in the news that a lot of areas, a lot of communities are objecting to new data centers in their areas because they have the tendency to consume a lot of water, energy. Citizens are concerned that it's going to transfer a lot of the expense to them and stuff like that. I'm not here to debate that one way or the other, but it is nice that Microsoft is at least trying to be as sustainable as they can.

1:45You can see here, they have these things called SunStreams in my area. This is the Phoenix area. Apparently, that came online in fiscal year 2022, and it's 150 megawatt solar panel farm or something like that, I guess. They also have the wind farms here. There's a Bloom wind farm that says right there. I don't know where that is. Kansas. That makes a lot of sense. Plenty of wind in Kansas. I used to live there a long time ago. But the basic idea here is you need to get a good sense of the scope of what's available to you.

2:18For example, here where I am in Phoenix, it's West US 3. There are two other Wests, that's West US 2 and West US. I think the Los Angeles area, if we click on that, you can see here that it's in California. By the way, none of the actual addresses are supplied. You don't get the actual address of where this data center is. Now, if you want to find out that is searchable, it is findable, you can get there. But Microsoft makes that deliberately opaque just because they don't want a lot of visitors showing up at the front gate, I guess, or something like that.

2:53It's for security reasons as well as other things. You can see here that the year it was opened was 2012. But notice that there are no what we call availability zones there. That's strange for something that was built in 2012, I thought. But the basic idea there with an availability zone is probably best explained if I go back to Phoenix. Let me go over here to West US 3. You can see here that we have three zones, three availability zones. What is that? Well, let's just say you're using file storage in Microsoft's Cloud.

3:25If I've turned on availability zones, and you have to opt in for that, by the way, and it's, of course, at added expense, then it will write to potentially up to three data centers all at once. In fact, there's not a synchronizing timing delay. It's considered synchronous. In fact, when you write files there, for example, it doesn't even record the write until it's already been delivered to all three areas, all three availability zones, and then it records the write.

3:57So it's considered synchronous. There's some other things that are not quite perfectly synchronous, like virtual machines might not be perfectly synchronous, but they're pretty tight. Now, another thing to think about there as well is the kind of services and compliances that it offers. So for example, regional compliance, it has EU and US privacy shield. That's a compliance matter that you might have to comply with. If you're in the financial industry, you'll have to comply with subsidies oxley, which is what the SOX is. That's just the abbreviation for it.

4:28There's several other industry compliance things that it complies with as well. In the United States, HIPAA for health care requirements. I don't really know what a lot of these are. PCI DSS, that's credit card processing and storage. Global compliance, these are largely security related items as well, and you get the idea. So this, again, the reason why I'm bringing that up is because if you have to comply with in your company with certain kinds of requirements, you've got to see if it complies there. Otherwise, you'll be out of compliance, and that could get you into some trouble.

5:00So anyway, that is a lot of the different kinds of things you should look at when you determine. Obviously, you want to be as geographically close as you can to where you're actually working. So I live in Phoenix, so of course, I would choose West US 3. That would make the most sense in my organization. There are other redundancies where you can think about things like natural disasters. So for example, if we did have a big natural disaster in Phoenix, which we usually don't, and it had the potential to bring down not only West US 3, but all of the availability zones within West US 3, then it might need to have some kind of a fail over to East US 2, or something like that, or South Central US, which would probably not be touched by the same natural disaster that I might get here in Phoenix.

5:45Again, of course, at extra cost. Now, one thing I don't see in this image anywhere, they used to have it. They used to show satellites in outer space that you could also see, but they removed them for some reason. I don't know why. Maybe Microsoft doesn't want you to know that Bill Gates has a big mothership in outer space, or something like that. And by the way, as a quick side note, outer space is becoming a big factor. Elon Musk is making serious conversations about exploring, I guess with SpaceX, putting data centers in outer space.

6:17What's part of the reason for that? Because of what I just discussed earlier in this video, where citizens were concerned about the power grid, and some areas are experiencing rolling kind of brownouts and stuff like that, because of the power drain of certain data centers. Again, I don't want to touch that hot button topic too hard, but in outer space, you kind of have unlimited resources there, at least solar-wise, to be able to pull in power. So that is an emerging conversation that will, I think, someday happen. Also, you see in this all the fiber optic cables that go underneath the sea, like down here to South America.

6:51We have a lot that goes over here to the Europe area. And this is a very sensitive area in our world these days. Look at all the fiber optic cables that go along between Africa, southern Italy, no, southern Europe, and then a very big hot point right over here at the time of this recording, which I won't get into right now. There are nation-states, by the way, that have submersibles. I actually don't know if they're ship-based or if they are submersibles.

7:22They're designed to actually cut these fiber optic cables under the sea. So even that technology is becoming a point of conflict there, because when these get cut, you cut off your transaction. You cut off your internet and everything like that. It's a little understated, but anyway. I read an article not long ago that there are trillions of dollars worth of transactions that take place every hour over these fiber optic cables. So you can see the significance of how important all of that is.

7:52Anyway, there's different ways of viewing this. We're looking at the globe view now. You can also look at a map view, which is kind of less 3D-ish or whatever. And there's also a table view if you want just more information. This is going to expose more of that to you. And you can also sort on the legend as well as regional filters, again, for things like your compliance. Now, in the next video, we'll actually take a tour of a Microsoft data center. And I find that it kind of helps when you're thinking about moving into a Microsoft Azure environment to be able to see some of the stuff that goes on in a Microsoft data center and how they're set up.

8:30We'll do that by clicking on this link right here. And I'll see you in the next video about that.

0:00All right, then now let's go ahead and further explore a couple of other things here. So in the last video, I concluded by talking about the fact that SpaceX is looking into shooting data centers into space and there's also the other direction you can go and that would be under the sea. And we're not gonna get into this too much. I just wanna point this out to you. It's kind of interesting to look at. Microsoft did put, actually there's a better location here. Yeah, see this right here? Microsoft put a submersible data center under the sea off the coast of Scotland, which is by the way, where I was born. This is not very far from there.

0:30And you can see them kind of, it's kind of bubbling up. Maybe there's a better look at it here. Yeah, so it's coming up out of the sea effort. I think it was under there for two years and it was filled with nitrogen instead of oxygen because oxygen can contribute to corrosion. This is supposed to be a data center that had only about an eighth of the failure rate as a land-based data center. Normally data centers will try to guarantee at least four nines. So that's what Microsoft guarantees as well, which is 99.99% uptime. And if there's a failure outside of that, then they compensate you somehow, but it's really only for the product that you pay for.

1:08So if your business is down for that length, for whatever the length of time is, all they do is they reimburse you for the outage for their services. They don't reimburse you for maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost business or something. Anyway, at least it's something. I'm just gonna scroll down and show you some other photos that they have over here and everything. You can see them spraying off all the barnacles and stuff like this. I guess it was powered by wind. And, oh, this is interesting. So this is the actual data center itself is called the payload.

1:38And then this is the shell that it goes into. I thought they'd have some kind of high-tech powered pneumatic way or something like that of putting this in the shell and taking it out. But it's really just a manual labor. There's somebody on a come along that pushes and pulls a lever on some kind of a pulley system to move this in and out of the data center. Anyway, must have been a smashing success. Look how happy that guy is. It must have been good. So anyway, I only point that out just to show you other ways that are in progress right now of maximizing the potential for optimum data center locations.

2:10Now, I wanted to take a tour thing. I don't know if you saw my clicker right there, but this is actually a Microsoft virtual tour. I actually went on one of these virtual tours, kind of, it was really a webcast tour that I went on with Microsoft. This is about a year and a half or two ago. And it was pretty interesting. So you can see here, there's a lot of different things. Here's their sustainable energy. If I click on it, renewable energy. Microsoft claims to be, I think, 70% energy independent. I don't know if there's a way to verify that or not, but anyway, there it is. Here's their carbon usage, as that may interest many people.

2:44The recycling, that's actually kind of interesting. The data center tour that I went on, I'm not sure if I'm remembering this right, but someone asked how many hard drives failed per day. And the person that was leading the tour said about a hundred drives per day, hard drives. I don't know if that's per region or per actual data center, but that seemed like a lot. Anyway, when they recycle those drives, what they do with them is, I knew they destroyed them somehow. Some organizations will put a drill through them or something like that, which is not really that effective.

3:16And I knew that Microsoft shredded them. I just didn't know how much. They actually shred them to powder, and then they recycle the powder. I don't know how they do it, but anyway. You can see here there's a perimeter fence. For obvious reasons, they have to secure the whole area. And then here is the checkpoint that you must go through in order to get inside the fence. Then when you enter the lobby, this is where things kind of start to get interesting in various ways. So first of all, when you enter the lobby, you get an AI assistant. Thank you for that. Okay, let's just close that up. We'll explore the lobby.

3:47As you can imagine, as you enter in, you're greeted by a receptionist here, who I'm sure also has some kind of security training. And then you would, I'm sure you have a pre-authorization to get in, or even if you're a Microsoft employee, you still have to pass through various security measures. Anyway, they also go through these, we used to call them man traps, but they don't call them that anymore. Now they call them security vestibules. Maybe man traps sounds too much like some kind of nightclub or something. Anyway, there are biometric checks.

4:17Yeah, actually it's called an access control vestibule now. Okay, it says it has multi-factor biometrics and full body metal detectors for all staff and visitors. One thing that is not listed there that I thought was kind of interesting that I learned about at a recent conference that I went to, is they actually weigh you when you go in and they weigh you again when you come out to make sure that number one, you haven't taken something in that you then left inside the building. And then when you come out, that you're not coming out with more than you went in with for security purposes.

4:49So anyway, before you visit one of these, it might be a good day to skip breakfast, okay? I'd have to skip several meals before I would stop being embarrassed about being weighed to go in. Anyway, there's the operations room. I also learned by the way, that there are only about between 14 and 16 employees in these Microsoft data centers. Doesn't really take that many employees to manage the IT here. Now I'm sure there's other employees that are doing grounds and security and maintenance and all that kind of stuff. But in terms of the actual IT, only 14 to 16 employees.

5:21And you can see there's kind of all kinds of sensors up here that they're measuring. I don't know if these really reveal very much. This was interesting. I've mentioned this in other courses that I've taught. Microsoft tracks more than 100 trillion threat signals daily. That's a staggering amount. And they have 34,000 security experts. Wow. There are also multiple sensors that operate here. I can't remember the number, but it's thousands of various sensors in the data center. And this would be for things like would be obvious, like a temperature, drive failures, that sort of thing, network failures, network anomalies.

5:55But anyway, there are thousands of those kinds of things that they track in there. So as we continue on through, we can enter the mechanical area. And again, this will be linked for you down. Well, actually it's part of the same link I provided earlier. You just choose the menu option to go to the data center. This is the mechanical area. You can see the cooling towers, stuff like that, electrical generators. There's renewable energy there with a little windmill. Oh, that's new. I haven't seen that before. That might've been added recently. Anyway, a lot of different stuff you can click on through that as well. I'm gonna go into the server room where all the good stuff is.

6:27So one of the things I'll point out about the server room for Microsoft is that they have several different generations of servers, but Microsoft actually develops, actually designs their own server blades. They don't just buy off the shelf or custom design their own from Dell or something like that or Lenovo or HP or whoever. They actually design them and then they outsource them to be actually built and then returned to them. So kind of interesting. This is, one of the things that's also interesting about this, let me change my resolution.

7:00It's kind of low res. Trying to get to HD here. I guess that's a little better. But you can actually look at the server blades that they do design. So here's one of them. This is a JBOD blade. It's kind of hard to spin around here right now, but there it is. And the JBOD, JBOD stands for just a bunch of disks. Can be configured a number of different ways. Why will this not stop spinning? Oh my goodness. I'm getting lost in here. Whole process is making me seasick. Anyway, so there's a JBOD blade for storage. And then as we click on next through, they have several different compute blades that they've put up.

7:31AI of course is a big deal with everybody these days. Generation eight, generation nine, whatever that means. But again, Microsoft designs all of these for themselves. Here's the Maya ones. These are related to AI here. Anyway, I recommend you kind of take a peek at some of this stuff. It is actually pretty interesting. And they do have some new elements that I'm observing here that they didn't have the first time that I looked at this whole tour. So I guess they update this periodically and I'll just leave it at that. So I would recommend you kind of go through this. It's very interactive, very interesting to look through.

8:02And I would just take a peek at it. Now, one of the things that you'll find is if I go back into the network room is they also have some interesting design choices that they've made. I don't know if you noticed, but the data center room that we were in earlier, kind of boring, visually speaking. Microsoft doesn't put a big emphasis on aesthetics. A lot of the co-location facilities that you might lease space from that are not part of Azure, well, a lot of times they will be pretty aesthetic, colorful LEDs and all this kind of stuff. But there's a little bit of a marketing thing there.

8:33Another part of that though is some of those data centers will use the LEDs for visual signals for something that's going wrong. For example, Google uses that in some of their data centers. Some of them are just as boring as Microsoft's. But on the other hand, some of the LEDs will change color if something's going wrong. I don't know if a hard drive's failing or system's overheated or something like that. But they also are very careful about even the materials they use. So for example, here you can see, this is just a plywood wall. It's a specially constructed kind of a plywood that's designed to resist dust.

9:07So they actually think through a lot of this stuff very carefully. And then you can see the fiber optic cables coming up and down here as well. Fiber optic very frequently is gonna be yellow in color, but there are different colors for fiber optic that designate its capacity and its type and stuff like that. Ethernet cables can be really usually any color. A lot of times it's white, a lot of times it's blue, but really it can kind of get it a lot of different colors. It doesn't really necessarily mean anything. With fiber, it does have various meanings. Oh, look, there it is. That's exactly what I was just talking about. The plywood panels, treated with a special coating that does not release particulates.

9:41Wow. Oh, wow, this is a new room here as well. This is the innovation room. There's the project magnetic that I was talking about earlier, submersibles. I'm not gonna go into all the rest of this, but again, pretty interesting to just kind of explore your way around. I'm kind of going down a black hole with this whole tour. So check it out on your own, quite interesting.