Previously, we discussed how Azure Stack enables hybrid cloud.
In this session, Jay Livens of Actifio and Karl Rautenstrach of Microsoft Azure discuss how Azure enables SQL developers to build apps in the cloud.
Giovanni Tropeano: We started the conversation talking about application development DevOps, right that whole process. We are finding traditional businesses out there like car companies for example, are actually shifting from becoming manufacturing company of traditional goods and services, to actually being a software company. Being able to have an efficient software development process in-house where they can become more competitive. How does Azure enable SQL developers to build apps in the cloud?
Jay Livens: So I thought that maybe I would start with that one. One of the interesting things and we talked a lot earlier about the criticality of data. But you know the data is really part of it, and it’s also of course all of the underlined infrastructure as well. So for example, we have a company with many developers, 900 developers. And so for them, the development piece is almost as important as production because if it goes down for whatever reason, now they are going to get stuck with 900 people who won’t be doing their job. So what they leverage the cloud for, is the ability to not only make sure they have their data there, but also use it for the dynamic provisioning of development environment, so that they can be working, and the people can be working locally using a dedicated VPN and the cloud, and working as if the server’s next door, not knowing that it could be across the country or elsewhere in the cloud. So it provides a lot of flexibility for them, because now they are no longer hindered by, I can only have this many servers, or this much compute or this much power, they just can dynamically spent up instances using standard tools, things like Ansible, Chef, Puppet or whatever, to basically bring up these developments instances instantly inside of the cloud and their developers can be up and running and off to the races, and when their project is done, click a button, all that gets broken down, they don’t need that anymore. They can keep doing this dynamically to allow some of these advanced stuff that we talked about earlier, the Continuous Integration, Continuous Development Functionality, and that extends over to the pipeline even to QA and all that kind of stuff. So environments can be spurn up as needed, and then spurned down, with the data and the compute and everything going with it dynamically.
Karl Rautenstrauch: So Jay, if there are folks listening to this call, who are not familiar with the term infrastructure as a code, you just nailed it. I mean that is infrastructure as code. And next time, you hear that, you hear that buzz word phrase, folks now you know thanks to Jay you know exactly what that is. And really the only thing that I’ll add is; a choice of deployment models. So the great thing you gain with a platform and its solution like Actifio is data portability and data movement and multi cloud and heterogeneous infrastructure support and capabilities. And that is really important in any public cloud platform, one to make sure that you don’t get into a Hotel California situation.
We don’t want you to feel like you are trapped, right? You can check in but can never leave Azure. We want you to love our services. So make sure that you got the means to move around, make sure that your data remains portable. And that portability extends to the deployment platform, the deployment type. So you can deploy your deploy your database instances on virtual machines in Azure, or you can use our hosted infrastructures for PostgreSQL, MySQL and of course SQL server what we call Azure SQL, where you are managing those database instances, but you are no longer managing the server in the underlying operating system. So being able to move those instances, those tables, so procedures back and forth, between those different types of deployments, based on what’s best for your business and who you have from a staffing perspective, is really, really important and really empowers you to get the best you can out of Azure and any public cloud or private cloud platform.
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hear more from Karl and Jay about analytics in the cloud.
Learn more during our webinar Protecting Workloads in Azure