Learnings from Customers that have modernized their Applications to Azure

It has been almost a year since I have been in my new role. I am thoroughly enjoying the role, especially the exposure to customers across Asia and globally via my peers in US and EMEA. The common question I have addressed this year has been - "Why should an organization modernize their applications?" In this article I will outline my observations/learnings about the benefits of modernizing and also cover the end of support options for SQL Server and Windows Server 2012 recently announced at MS Inspire. SQL Server 2012 end of support is less than a year away - July 12, 2022 and October 10, 2023 for Windows Server 2012/2012R2.

This article covers:

1. Why modernise your Applications (Apps)?
2. Benefits of modernising Apps to the cloud
3. How to get started on the modernisation journey?
4. Benefits of migrating/modernising to Azure
5. End of Support options for Windows Server 2008/2008 R2/2012 and SQL Server 2008/2008R2/2012

Why modernise your Apps?

The pandemic and the effects of COVID-19 have required organizations and their processes to be digitalized. The remote-work options for employees has put increased pressure on current IT applications and infrastructure. One such organisation that benefited from being on the cloud is NSW Pathology for whom a modern application and data platform enabled scaled growth by helping them keep up with the increased pathology testing since the onset of COVID-19. Managing to work with this level of agility, especially in a secure way, wouldn't have been possible on-premises.

Moreover, traditional organizations are also facing increasing competition from digital born competitors. Customers are now expecting real time, and modern experiences when engaging with your organisation (whether through apps, bots and/or cross channels in a predictive manner)

The diagram below outlines other triggers for organisations to modernise their applications. I observed that Datacenter contract expiry and End of Support of HW and SW have been the main drivers followed by the need to address security threats and compliance. To address the latter, Microsoft's Azure service - Sentinel provides intelligent security analytics, powered by AI, for the entire enterprise; thereby providing CxOs the required peace of mind.

But everything is working fine, and cloud is not the most cost effective...

This mindset needs to change to one of "Why wouldn't I change and what is the opportunity cost of not having an agile environment to be able to derive the required actionable insights?"

Aside from the typical cloud benefits of right-sizing of infrastructure, elasticity in compute, storage size and now even disk bursting (for increased IOPS/throughput - required for database performance) to handle workloads of all sizes and performance characteristics. AzureSQL for example provides capabilities like enabling readable secondaries to being able to easily scale and drive real-time insights for different areas of one's organization with Azure SQL Database Hyperscale named replicas and highest levels of security with Always encrypted with secure enclaves on Azure SQL are much easier to achieve in the cloud.

With regards to cost, my observations have been that those customers who take into consideration the holistic costs associated with operating their applications (instead of only compute costs), clearly see the benefits of moving to the cloud. These customers enjoy the benefits of evergreen PaaS services such as App Services, AKS or Azure SQL (note that Azure is the only cloud to provide evergreen SQL Server service). This eliminates the planning time and costs of constant upgrades/patching of the infrastructure and associated applications and enables delivery of new features and capabilities driving business value. Read about how Komatsu Australia (saw 49% cost reduction and 25-30% performance gains), Wolters Kluwer and Inlitix (leveraging serverless Azure SQL) benefited from this.

Studies from research organizations such as Forrester and ESG also confirm my above stated learnings. The ESG's study shows that customers can experience 47% savings when shifting on premises SQL Server workloads on Azure VMs, and an additional 17% and $30M of revenue increase by migrating applications to use Azure SQL/ SQL MI.

How did they get started on the modernisation journey?

As I mentioned earlier, I observed that customers migrated or modernised their applications due to end of support on their HW/SW (such as Windows/SQL Server 2008/R2) or becuase of their datacenter expiry.

For larger migrations such as these, customers started by assessing their on-premises environment (Apps, Databases and Infrastructure) to help them build both a business case and a technical plan for migration. Microsoft assisted these customers with the Azure Migrate and Modernise Program (AMMP ) offering. This program provided customers with the expert help they needed to assess and plan the migration of their workloads to the cloud and to help them set up their cloud environment properly in order for them to move forward with confidence.

Customers who went with smaller migrations started by testing migrations of their internal tools/smaller dev/test SQL Server databases/apps. They leveraged the following tools to assist with these types of migrations:

• Azure Migrate
• Azure Data Migration Service
• DMA

Upon successful migration of 2-3 applications and databases, the Cloud Adoption Framework was used to setup a repeatable production ready process.

A critical part of customers successful migration/modernization journey was the upskilling of the various teams: those involved in the migration, those in operations and the DBA teams. Oh yes DBAs will still play an important role despite the level of automation/AI capabilities in the PaaS services. They will be involved in cost management, performance optimization, configuration of scaling and in platform architecture. I have also observed that once workloads have migrated to Azure, the reduced time in managing databases has provided some of the clever DBAs an opportunity to cross-skill into analytics/ML/ and even in the world of data science especially in relation to data engineering aspects of it.?One of the aspects of the AMMP program mentioned above is skilling and I am including links to some of the top resources to help you get started.

• Microsoft Learn
• Learn Azure SQL Video Series
• Those that love to learn by getting hands dirty - don't need to look any further than the great Anna Hoffman and Bob Ward's Azure SQL Workshop .
• Davide's Blog - great developer focused posts that showcase the "batteries included" (all capabilities included) features of Azure SQL.

But Why Migrate/Modernise the apps to Azure?

The key reasons I observed for customers selecting Azure for migrating/modernsing their applications to Azure were:

• For SQL Server based applications - Azure is the only cloud service that provides fully managed and always up to date (evergreen) platform, while also maintaining compatibility with on-premises SQL Server. This makes the migrations easier, requires lesser re-testing, and makes it easier and more convenient for the DBA/operations teams to be able to leverage existing SQL Server experience and tooling. Note: Azure SQL is a "batteries included" database and can also be used by Modern application developers (such as a IoT solution developed by RXR Realty in response to Covid-19 back to work safety and a Graph querying app by power company BKW ) and by startups (such as Campbrain in North America and a large scale B2B Unicorn startup in India who had developers with MySQL knowledge)
• For Non-SQL Server (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB) and NoSQL based applications - Azure provides cost competitive PaaS offerings in this space and are based on community editions (ensuring portability). CosmosDB provides a fully managed NoSQL database service which provides APIs for MongoDB and Cassandra. I observed that applications that are migrated from these environments to CosmosDB are done with minimal changes. See Patrik's post for further details.
• Ability to leverage investment of existing licenses of Windows Server and SQL Server to save costs. Migrating to Azure because of Azure Hybrid Benefit (AHB) rights means reduced cost, since customers only have to pay for compute and storage costs. There are also other unique Azure benefits that customers experienced when they migrated their SQL Server based applications to Azure. Some of these include:

- Dual use rights for 180 days (6 months) - for worry free migration plans

- Core multiplier - resulting in SQL Server license savings and making it easier to migrate highly consolidated (through virtualization) to the cloud

- HA/DR benefit - Free HA and DR in Azure (up to 2 secondary replicas)

- Dev/test pricing - customers took advantage of their Visual Studio subscriptions

- Unlimited virtualisation rights only on Azure dedicated hosts

• True Hybrid with Azure Arc - with Azure Arc customers can run their apps and databases (including Azure SQL MI) on-premises or even on other cloud providers
• Integration with other Azure services including analytics services such as Synapse through Synapse link (currently supports CosmosDB with support for Azure SQL eminent), end user services within Power Platform including PowerBI and Power Apps (in order to make data truly actionable by anyone in the organisation). I'd like to mention a customer in Australia, Blackmores who has been at the forefront of leveraging the power of this integration to drive business agility.
• Support from Microsoft and Partner organisations, including programmatic support and free migration tools, proof of concepts/trials and support via the AMMP program which includes access to engineering resources as well as skilling.
• Free support for Windows Server and SQL Server 2008/R2 - customers migrated to Azure to continue to gain support and minimise risks for 3 years (ending on Jan 10, 2023 and July 12, 2022 respectively) as they modernised once having migrated to Azure.

We are aware that not all customers were able to reap the benefit of the Free support and/or have actioned on their Windows/SQL Server 2008/R2 applications and databases.

So, at Inspire we announced a new Aure-only offer for Windows Server and SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2. For those customers who need more time to upgrade and modernize their Windows Server and SQL Server and 2008 and 2008 R2 on Azure, we will now provide one additional year of extended security updates only on Azure. With this, customers will have until January 10, 2024 and July 12, 2023, to upgrade their Windows Server and SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2, respectively, in Azure, to a supported release.

On the topic of End of Support (EOS) - what about SQL Server/Windows Server 2012

SQL Server 2012 end of support is less than a year away - July 12, 2022 and October 10, 2023 for Windows Server 2012/2012R2.

EOS means the end of extended support, which includes access to critical security updates. These updates are essential to protect customers against potential security vulnerabilities. Customers should begin planning for EOS immediately to protect their data and applications. Here are the options that were announced at Inspire 2021:

• Migrate to Azure and get free SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 Extended Security Updates. This applies to lift and shift of workloads to Azure VM. Customers will receive Extended Security Updates for 3 more years only on Azure.
• Upgrade on-premises or in Azure - to the latest versions of the software - either on-premises or in Azure – and consistently apply the latest patches from Microsoft. The latest versions of software provide the most advanced security, as well as other innovations.
• Buy up to 3 more years of Extended Security updates for Windows Server & SQL Server on-premises

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