 Today in Azure Unblogged, we're going to be talking about the Azure Resource Mover product with CASA. So stay tuned. So welcome to today's episode of Azure Unblogged with myself, Sarah Lean. Today, I'm joined with CASA from the Azure Resource Mover team. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Sarah. Thanks for having me on the show. It's awesome to have you. Now, at Ignite 2020, your team announced a new product called Azure Resource Mover. Could you tell us a bit more about what that product is, please? Sure. Yes. Like you rightly pointed out, right? Azure Resource Mover launched at public preview during Ignite September of 2020, right? So primarily Azure Resource Mover helps customers to move their Azure resources to their region of choice, right? In the public region. So as of today, we support all the public regions worldwide, and by move, right? So when you look at the move as of a resource, let's go and talk about it in depth, right? So let's take an example of like, say, SQL DB, right? So today, you can use fail-over groups or like SQL GRDR, like technologies behind the scenes to move SQL DBs, right? And they have their own sort of a specific steps which a customer needs to follow. When you take an example of, say, storage accounts, right, you can follow AZ copy and other related technologies to move storage accounts, right? Like for a VM, you can actually utilize DR capabilities for Azure Site Recovery and then move your VMs as well, right? All of these require different steps, different technologies which a customer needs to understand. And all of this takes time, resources, and it's complex, right? So as you move the different resources, right? So what Azure Resource Mover provides us is fundamentally addresses these customer pain points, right? So first, it actually provides you like a single pane of glass. So it doesn't matter what resource you're looking to move. You can follow the same structured step-by-step sort of process and move your resources from a source to a time region, right? So that is the one of the key, sort of the value for Azure Resource Mover. The second is when you look at, from a different technology perspective, right? Customers have to use different things, but right now what Azure Resource Mover does is it's provides like an abstraction layer on top where all the different technologies underneath are transparent to the customer. So if you want to use ASR to move VMs or SQL GODR to move SQL DBs, all of these are sort of abstracted out, right? So it becomes a much more user-friendly and a seamless experience, right? So that is another added benefit from our Azure Resource Mover perspective. In all of this, compared to the traditional way of moving things, right? So a lot of manual touch points takes a lot of time, resources. So what Azure Resource Mover primarily does is addresses those at core, right? So all of this, the abstraction layer and the single pane of glass helps to provide a much more user-friendly experience and then reduce the touch points and overall sort of the complexity of the move, which is typically most perceived as, you know, quite an undertaking, right? But because of this, it's a much more easier and a simpler structure. That sounds really good. I think probably we've all had to move some kind of Azure Resource and had to, like you say, dig into how you move that and some of the various different caveats that you have to follow when you're moving a resource. I take it our customers have asked us for this product to support a number of their scenarios. Could you tell us a little bit more about the specific scenarios a customer would actually find themselves in trying to move a resource? Sure, you know, like, based on a lot of customer engagements in the last year or so, right? So we have learned a lot, right? So customers, you know, the top of mind for them, the key sort of teams or scenarios which they are looking for, right? Is the first is, you know, the Azure region expansion, right? So one of the key differentiators of Azure today is it's massive footprint, right? We have 60 plus regions worldwide and counting, right? We are pretty much adding on an ongoing basis as we speak, right? So customers could have started their journey back in the day in the region which was available back then, right? So, but today, because of changing business needs and market dynamics, they're looking to move to the new region which Azure just announced, right? So that would help them to be closer to their customers and, you know, also optimize their workloads by, you know, reducing the latency aspects and performance and all of the good stuff, right? So that's one of the key scenarios where, you know, customers have been asking us for a more related capability, right? The second is, you know, the Azure availability zones, right? So if you're familiar with the AZ's availability zones, it's like a highly available, highly resilient offering from Azure, right? And these are in different regions worldwide as well. And we are also expanding that offer too, right? So we have seen a lot of customers do ask is the data sovereignty, the compliance in the regulatory aspects, right? Because customers can have resources in different regions worldwide, right? But they conduct business in one or two regions and primarily, and but because of the recent laws and changing sort of the dynamics, right? Where they have been requesting that government have been requesting that you got to go put your resources in the same geopolitical boundary, right? So they can take advantage of Azure Resource More, move your resources into your primary region where you conduct your business and ensure that you meet your, you know, local data sovereignty and regulatory compliance needs, right? So that's another big sort of a scenario which actually helps customers from the resource more, right? The fourth I would say is, you know, things like your M&A, right? So as customers are looking to kind of expand their business in utilizing the cloud platform, right? They have another opportunity in a different part of the world and they want to sort of have an M&A use case. So then, you know, they would end up with like different resources in different sort of regions worldwide, right? To make their more experience of managing these resources more seamless and simplistic, they can take advantage of resource more, move them to a simpler sort of footprint, if you will, in one or two couple of regions where they conduct the business and move that, right? So I hear the system also has a key role to play in such scenarios, right? So these are, I would say, the top, you know, teams which we have discussed with the customers from last year or so. It sounds really good from a customer point of view. We're actually listening to their feedback and developing products that can help them in various different scenarios. And I'm sure there's a few scenarios that maybe our customers will find out how to use Azure Resource Mover that we haven't covered. For sure. Now, as you said, we already have mechanisms in place to move Azure resources to different locations. Might not be perfect, but it already exists. Why should a customer think about moving away from maybe the process they already have and using Azure Resource Mover instead? Sure, that's actually an excellent question, Sarah, right? So to answer that, I think we can switch gears. I've created like one slide, which actually talks about the key benefits from Azure Resource Mover perspective. So I'll take a quick minute to bring this slide up. So here, in this slide, we talk about the key sort of the benefits which customers can utilize by leveraging Azure Resource Mover, right? So if you see the top part of it, so we have broken down into some sort of pillars, right? These are like value pillars. So optimize your workloads, plan with ease, orchestrate seamlessly and move with confidence, right? So these are like Uber level sort of value pillars. Still, them have some supporting sort of points, right? Which we will go into depth, right? So let's start with the optimized workloads, right? So as I was mentioning earlier, right? Because Azure is expanding the footprint, customers can take advantage of resource more, move to that new region, and that way they can be closer to their customers, right? And in turn, they can optimize the workloads because they can reduce the latency aspects, right? So that is another benefit which they would get to using Azure Resource Mover, right? The second is optimization of their actually the, you know, the footprint in order to comply with the data residency and the governance, which we just discussed as one of the key top customers scenarios, right? Where they can actually optimize their sort of workloads and all of that to ensure that they are sort of compliant with the geopolitical, you know, laws and regulations, right? The third from an optimized workload, you know, the pillar is sort of increasing the, you know, high availability and the resiliency of the resources and applications, right? Like how we just discussed earlier, they can actually ensure they move to for a non-evaluability zone to an availability zone ready region and, you know, move into and add resiliency to their apps, right? This in turn can help them, the customers to actually offer more premium offerings and higher SLAs and all of that to their customers, right? So that's another way where they can actually optimize, you know, their, the current workloads with using Azure Resource Mover, right? The second pillar is about the planning aspects and how you actually plan for the move, right? So when you look at today, right? So, you know, Azure Resource Mover, one of the key things which it does is actually identifies the dependency, dependent resources, right? So let's take an example of a VM, right? Where, you know, Nick is a dependent resource. We have NSG, you know, subnets, IP addresses and all of that. All these topology, you know, these resources are required for a VM to sort of come alive on the target, right? So customers would have to typically find them manually and then make sure that they, you know, move them, you know, step by step with different type of resources. That's a very complex thing, right? Whereas in this case, from a resource mover, the experience itself, we have a dependency algorithm which runs in the backend and identifies the dependent resources for you. And that actually provides a much more streamlined and a user-friendly experience, right? That way they can plan the move with a lot more, you know, ease and peace of mind, right? So because of that, you know, the customers can actually now plan large scale moves because they don't need to worry about, you know, moving 10, 20 VMs or SQL DBs and whatnot, right? Now because of this improvement in the seamlessness and the least amount of touch points, they can plan large scale moves of, you know, 400 nicks or 400 VMs and 200 nicks and a couple hundred EVs and whatnot, right? So they can plan large moves with the comfort that, you know, it's a very step-by-step guided journey and then they can successfully move from a source to target future, right? The third is, you know, the customers can actually utilize their prescribed downtime because that's another huge area because this, you know, it's a, the move happens during, you know, scheduled downtime where, you know, customers have a lot in the business during say a weekends or a holiday time, they can take advantage of just that window, right? And then they can plan that move and as your resource work can be scheduled to ensure that the actual move happens during that window, right? That's a huge benefit from a customer planning perspective, right? The third pillar is, you know, orchestrate seamlessly, right? Where, you know, what we were discussing earlier is, you know, the movement of resources across, you know, the experience has been improved to such an extent where, you know, like a single pane of glass we have provided and you can actually move, doesn't matter which type of resource, you still follow the same structured sort of a framework and the step-by-step process, right? Which actually gives them a much more user-friendly and a seamless piece of mind, right? So because of this sort of, you know, single pane of glass and abstraction of the different technologies underneath, the different manual touch points are reduced, right? Because you might, you know, have more touch points in moving one resource versus the other, but just because we have made it much more consistent experience across, so the number of touch points are reduced and in turn, this actually helps you to reduce the overall move time, right? Obviously, it depends on the amount of data which a customer is looking to move, but, you know, overall it can help you reduce the, you know, compared to the previous sort of model of moving resources from say, a month's to weeks to maybe even days, right? So that's a huge benefit where this sort of an experience can bring to the table, right? Last but not the least is, you know, the conference aspect, because customers have to have full confidence that as they're moving resources from a source to target region, all should go well, right? Because, you know, nothing should, you know, there should be no issues and things like that, right? So one of the first things is, you know, the orchestration itself happens in the fully, you know, highly secured and encrypted Azure environment, right? None of the resources actually leave the Azure space. So, you know, there'll be no options for like, you know, security breaches and whatnot, right? So you can actually have that peace of mind and then ensure that the move is, you know, pretty much your full control, right? You have a full conference aspect. The second is, you know, you can validate the move before the final commit, right? Because, you know, you prepare your move, you initiate your resources, initiate move your resources. Then there is something called a discard move, right? Where think of it as like a failback option, right? When you failover and something goes wrong or if you don't like what you see, you have an option to failback, right? So something similar is what we have baked into our resource more experience where the final step is like commit, right? When all looks good on the target side, all the resources are present and you're ready to kind of commit to the final, in a step of the process, you hit commit, right? But for whatever reason, right? So, you know, things didn't go well or maybe you decided to change your mind. So there is an option to sort of failback, right? So you can actually hit discard and you can come back to, you know, pretty much square one, right? We can restart the process and walk not at your own time and in a window, right? So that's another huge benefit. And the last is because of this sort of validation, you can actually do this multiple times, right? Until you get the full conference. Imagine like a large scale customer, right? Moving 800 resources together, right? So then the customer would plan it in multiple stages, maybe do a DevTest workload or maybe move a bunch of VMs, kind of get a feel of things. And then once they're, you know, ready and they can have a full conference behind the scene, then they can actually full commit the entire, you know, the move process, right? So that's another huge benefit which Azure Resource Moer provides today. Awesome. It definitely sounds like it has a lot of benefits. Now, last time I counted, we have all well over 200 different resource types in Azure. What does Azure Resource Mover support all of them? Or because you guys are still in preview, are you working your way up to support in all of them? What does that look like at the moment? That's a great question, Sarah. I think you rightly pointed out, right? So today in, you know, within Azure, right? We have about 150 to 200 all resources if I'm not wrong. And obviously, you know, when moving resources, right? We have to start somewhere, right? So there's a few steps. So as a public preview, right? So, you know, what you see on the screen today is, you know, we offer about, you know, 10 to 12 resources to start with and things like your virtual machines, you know, your virtual networks, load balancers, mix, you know, elastic pool, SQL DBs, you know, all of these are supported out of the door as of now. And, you know, we are, as you said, we have been receiving feedback from customers and we're working in the back end to ensure that we expand the scope of this offering, right? So, you know, as of now it's 10 to 12, but in the subsequent releases and milestones, you know, coming up in the future, you'll see this matrix kind of expand to 2030, you know, more to 50 and 100, right? So it's, yeah, it's a starting point for us for now. Cool. It sounds like a very good starting point for our customers to get familiar with this new product. Would it be possible for you to show us a demo of it actually working, please? Yes, I think that's the fun part, right? So I will quickly change gears now. Yes, so I think I have the portal ready. So what you're looking at now is the Azure portal and the portal.azure.com and to search for the, you know, the service, right? So you go here in the search bar and search for Azure resource mover. So that's the first thing you pop up here. And what you see is this landing page, right? So this is where you see customers can come in and start to move, right? So on this page, you see three different constructs, right? One is sort of move resources to another subscription. Second is move resources to another resource group. The third is move resources to another region, right? So this is where Azure resource mover plays a role currently. It helps customers to move resources to another region in the same subscription, right? So that's the key thing to note. As of now, we support movement of resources to another region within the same subscription. However, if customers want to move to another region and a different subscription, it's gonna be like a two-part step, right? First step would be to move across regions using Azure resource mover. And then they can take advantage of Azure resource manager, they're currently available in a solution using ARM and they can change the subscription on the target side, right? So that's another sort of a two-step journey. So I do want to kind of ensure we discuss that. And this landing page is basically all the move related things. So we wanted to make sure the customers can actually discover the move across subscription, the RGs and regions and sort of one stop shop. And that's this blade, right? So since this demo is about moving resources to another region, so let's go ahead and click this button here. So this blade, right? So it's probably asked you very basic set of questions. It's asked you about your subscription. So I'm gonna utilize my engineering subscription which I've created for this demo. And so the source region, so for the sake of this demo, I have created some resources in South Central US. And let's say our target region is West US 2, right? So let's pick these as our source target region pair and then click next, right? So this blade right now it's asking us to go select the resources you want to move from the source which is your South Central US to target region which is your West US 2, right? So let's go click select resources. So it's gonna prompt you go find your resources, right? So I've created for the sake of this demo, I've created a demo RG with a bunch of resources in it. There we go, we just found out these resources. So let's go and select a bunch, right? And I'm just gonna leave one just to show the dependency aspects in the demo. So let's say we are done, right? So we just add the resources here. And there's one blade I do want to kind of highlight here, right? So there's unable to view resources you want to move, right? So let's for an example, you want to move a Cosmos DB or a keyword or like service fabric and whatnot, right? Going back to the earlier support metrics which you just discussed Sara, right? Is today, if customers want to move something else, right? Because it's, we start off the journey with a limited sort of resource. So this is a great, you know, a blade where customers can come and provide directly feedback to the product team to us, right? Where we can take this feedback and prioritize our sort of, you know, onboarding of the different resources and our engineering priorities, you know, and subsequent, you know, releases and milestones, right? So this is a great opportunity where customers can provide us the direct feedback. So that's one key thing and then going forward with the move, right? So let's go click next. So what you see on this screen, right? So primarily it's just giving you a summary what you've done so far, right? So basically you have selected your subscription, you have selected your source target region pair combination and then the number of resources we selected, right? Which is the support for. And then here in the bottom part gives you a preview of what to look forward to in the next upcoming steps, right? Basically it's saying, hey, you've got to go validate your dependencies, you've got to go prepare your resources, initiate move. And then before, you know, once you finalize, you know, commit your resources, what are the different things you've got to go worry about, right? So it kind of highlights you that, hey, you can do commit or you want to do delete source or if you, you know, optional items like I mentioned is a discard, right? You can tell back if you need it. So just as a quick summary, so if you go proceed. So now the resources are getting added, as you see, it gives you this, the bell icon here, the resources are getting added. So let's go to this across regions tab. So in this tab is pretty much once the resources get added, these resources would get populated into this plate here, right? So the resources get added to like a, an entity, a logical container called a move collection, on which we perform all the move operations and move that resources from a source to target site, right? So if you see on the top bar, these are your primary sort of all the move related operations, right? So as of now, what we have done so far is we've just added resources and the resources are just getting added on into this new collection, right? But for whatever reason, you don't want to go ahead with the move and you know, you want to do it at later time and whatnot, you can actually select the resources and then you can click remove and all of them would get removed from the move collection, right? There you go. Now you see that, hey, the resources are populated here and we are pretty much, you know, getting ready for the move journey, right? So the actual move operations are the primary ones are these big ones, right? Which is primary in the prepare, initiate move, discard, commit and delete source, right? These are your larger sort of key, top of mind, you know, move operations which customers would actually utilize. So from a delete source perspective, right? Is, you know, if customers, once they have completed the move journey, they would want to go clean up the source side. So we have provided a native experience where customers can select this button and then go clean up the source resources, right? So it's a choice we have provided the customers because it was a recent feedback we have received and we wanted to make sure that, you know, this feedback is taken into the experience as well, right? So that's a newer, recent enhancements we have done. The feedback blade, if you click on this, right? This is where customers can actually provide feedback on how their overall, the experience was, how easy or how difficult was it? And if they have any pointed feedback to the engineering team, right, was here, they can actually provide, you know, direct any improvements they're looking for, any things they see which is missing in the experience, they can actually provide the feedback here and then we will go back and, you know, review these feedback and ensure that we catch it during our next engineering improvements and releases, right? So that's the important feedback blade to kind of look forward to. So let's go quickly walk through the bottom half of the blade, right? So these are all the resources, you know, the names I've just created for the sake of the demo. The different type of resources like what we mentioned earlier on. So it's a single experience we are trying to move in a different resources such as NSGs, public IP, VM, you know, watching networks, et cetera. All these resources today, you know, created a demo RG for the sake of this demo. There is an important column here which I do want to kind of talk about is the destination configuration, right? So if you, let's take an example of this VM, right? So if you click here, it brings you to this blade where you actually can customize the destination configuration settings, right? You can change things like your name of the VM, you can change this queue. Also, you know, going back to the earlier sort of the, the primary customer use case, right? If you're moving from a source region which does not have availability zones and to an availability zone ready region in the target side, you can actually pick the, you know, the zone where you want to land the VM into, right? So that's where this is where, you know, you can define the experience where you can select the, you know, the zone and then you would click save, right? So the, the set, the changes, the settings would get changed here and then you can actually go ahead and complete your rest of the move process, right? So that's another important part of the experience to keep an eye on. This status column is basically telling you where you are in your move journey, right? So today, as of now, we have just added the resources. So we haven't gotten to prepare step yet, right? So that's why it's saying that today, as of now, you are in the prepare pending state, right? But once you complete the prepare, it's gonna, you know, this, the state is gonna toggle, it's gonna change to say initiate move pending, right? As you complete progressively, you know, incrementally move along this, the framework of the move journey, you would get to a point where, you know, you would be commit move pending or delete source pending and whatnot, right? So this is just a status which customers can keep an eye on and understand where they are in the move process, right? The last column is basically, you know, issues and actions which we need to take, right? So as of now, it's basically, it's a flag. It's warning us that he got to do some task, right? And the task is basically validation of dependencies, right? Because it wants to go check that we have taken all of the source resources which are required to move this VM from a source to target region, right? So that is another, as I mentioned, is a key sort of an algorithm which is baked into resource mode. And that's what the step it's asking us to do here, right? So let's go ahead and click here. It says valid dependencies to verify if there's any action needed. So let's go click that. So it's gonna kick off the dependency algorithm in the backend. And it should take a couple of seconds and then it's gonna come back and tell us whether did we miss anything on the source side? And did we get all of the resources into the move collection, right? So that's what it's gonna check. So the validation is now complete and now it's telling us something. It says some resources in your list may require other resources to be moved along with them. Review and add the dependencies, right? So basically it said, hey, I found something which you missed. Make sure you go and add the dependency, right? So click on this button here. It's gonna go prompt what was left behind. We left behind the nick earlier on as part of the demo as you remember. So now it's saying that you're gonna need to go add it. So let's go select that and then add the dependency, right? So it's gonna ensure that the dependency, the nick is gonna get added on and then this should come back and get added here, right? And then the issue column pretty much would get cleared up and the validation would be pretty much complete. And that is where you can actually start the next pretty much your prepare, initiate, move, discard and the commit stages of the move journey, right? So prepare is a long-running operation and it takes because it looks at the data and you have to create the interim resources to move the VMs onto the target side. So that's a long-running operation which we would keep out of this demo from a time constraint perspective. But I do want to quickly highlight about this diagnosis plate, right? Where we have created an experience to ensure that we talk about seamless customer experience, right? Where customers can actually self-diagnose or self-troubleshoot, say something went wrong during say prepare step, right? So they can actually click this button and then there'll be a bunch of options to select, right? Maybe prepare operation is failed for whatever reason, right? So they can select that and gives you what are the recommended steps you as a user can actually follow to ensure that you can hopefully identify minor issues and unblock yourself, right? So this is a good example where the experience has been seamless enough where customers can pretty much, you know, you can fly solo, right? The diagnosis, you can self-validate and self-troubleshoot and then keep moving, right? So that's another important blade to keep an eye on in this overall experience. So that is pretty much in a nutshell, you know, the entire move journey using Azure portal, right? So likewise, we have also released PowerShell at public preview where customers are, you know, large customers, large scale customers we're looking to use, you know, PowerShell scripts and commandlets. We have released the entire, you know, the workflow of the move, right? Pretty much from add to validate dependencies to prepare, initiate, move, commit all the way to the commit stage. We have created commandlets and we have documented this whole process, you know, using like guided tutorial and how do we like move a VM or a SQL review at one and follow the different commandlets as well. So that's another great in a new client which you have in a success we launched at public preview. Awesome. I actually really like that demo. It looks like you and the team have really thought about what our customers need taking on board their feedback and it looks like it will be a much simpler process to actually move resources rather than dig into how each resource type needed to move and all the caveats around that. So we're done. I really, I really like that product and I love where you're going with it. We're going to be popping some information and some resource links in our description box. So please do check that out. And thank you again, Kaza for appearing on the show. I really do appreciate it. I've learned tons today. So thank you for that. And again, everybody check out the description box for further resources as well.