 Born or not. I never really born or not. Just say German. Say German, Schmidt. Born or not. Born or not. Yes. But super easy. Born or not. Okay. Easy. Okay. Welcome everyone. We are here with our next episode for our Azure Stack Partner Solution videos. And again, I'm here with Tiberio Radu who is a Principal Program Manager at the Edge Solution Team to talk about different partner solutions. Hi, Tibi. Welcome everyone. And so what are we going to talk today? Hello, Thomas. Hello, everyone. Today we're going to focus on a couple of partners that are actually providing a SaaS solution to their customers. So in the previous episodes, we've had a focus on something more like an enterprise customer, which created their own solution and they served their own internal customers. Now we're going to look at a set of customers that are actually creating this SaaS-like offering for their customers. But to make that happen, they have, they need to have the platform in place. They need to have the solution on top. And they need to make all of these things work as well as create a development environment where they can build things. But I don't want to get too much into details on this. I'll let Julian and Dino go into these details and take it from here. Okay. I'm here with Julian from Knowledge Park. Hi, Julian. Can you introduce yourself a little bit and your company you're working for? Hi, Thomas. Yes. So I'm working for Knowledge Park since 2011. We have a patient management system for dialysis in Germany. My field of action is the medical application management, infrastructure and operations and Azure and Azure Stack. Okay. That sounds pretty cool. It sounds like a very good job there. Can you tell me a little bit? I mean, we have you on the show for Azure Stack partner solutions, right? Can you tell me a little bit about your Azure Stack Hub integration, your Azure Stack Hub solution you're offering? Yes, of course. So we have two Azure Stack Hub all-flash systems from the hardware vendor, Dell. We run them in two data centers of Acquinet and together with the Azure Stack Hubs we also have an object store from Cloudion in three data centers to store large data for long-term purposes. And our business need for the Azure Stack solution is that we need to run cloud services on-premise because we need the data sovereignty at all times in our own data centers to meet our compliance requirements. Today we are running very business critical systems on the two Azure Stack Hubs. We are running over 200 dialysis centers all over Germany on our two stems. And today we treat patients like 18,000 chronicle patients in a quarter and almost 80,000 in-and-out patients. Okay, so you're basically offering really the cloud services we get with Azure Stack Hub, this consistent experience we offer with that, but that really helps you to bring that into your own data centers, right? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, that's the point, exactly. Okay, so I know that you're working in the healthcare space in Germany. Can you explain me a little bit more about what you're doing and actually how Azure Stack Hub helps you in that specific case? Yeah, of course. So we, as I mentioned before, we have a patient management system for dialysis in Germany. So it's a 10-year-old grown monolith, and now we have the need to transform it to new microservices. So we had a look at the market, and we were trying to figure out what is the best platform for our needs. So what we're trying to do is we take the monolith apart, build new microservices, and we want to offer the services as software, as a service in the healthcare market in Germany. Okay, so you're building these, you're modernizing these traditional applications to more cloud-native and modern SaaS applications, if you will, on top of Azure Stack, right? Right. So what we try to achieve or what we achieved is that we now use infrastructure as a service and infrastructure as a code, as well as ARM templates. So we can standardize our infrastructure in terms of code. So this is interesting, because I like the part where you said infrastructure is code and ARM templates, and I know that many of our customers obviously come from the Azure space, and they know that they can use the Azure Resource Manager templates to deploy infrastructure and services on Azure. But you can also use them on Azure Stack Hub, right? So you can exactly use the same deployment mechanisms. Interesting. So can you tell me a little bit more how you're using these ARM templates and how you're actually deploying to Azure Stack Hub? Yeah, of course. So what we are doing is we use the ARM templates together with Azure DevOps. We write our infrastructure into templates and code, and we deploy them either per script or we deploy them with build pipelines. Okay, that is pretty cool. So that would give you the flexibility to basically, as other customers do, or as you probably also do, to use Azure DevOps, to use these Azure DevOps processes to deploy the whole infrastructure to Azure. You're using the same process and the same tools to also do that with your Azure Stack Hub environment. Right. That's pretty cool. So as far as I understand, you're building the solution on top of your Azure Stack environment. You're really doing the modernization of the application and building these modern SaaS solutions. But there is also a site where it's about operations and about operating the Azure Stack. Do you have any help with that? Yes, we do. So to be successful in our project and that we can focus on software as a service, we have a partner, and our partner is Bordonaro IT in Germany, and they are doing the operations as a service for us. Okay, so they are taking care of your environment. So I think that is great. Thank you very much, Julian, for sharing this. We are switching over and let's talk to Dino about how they are actually helping to architect and operate an Azure Stack Hub environment. Sorry to interrupt, but before we switch over to Dino, I just wanted to add one thing. As Julian's team sort of started to work with these stamps and to build a solution on top, he also needed a way to have visibility across all these stamps and understand their usage and that sort of thing. And he came together with, he put together this dashboard. So it's actually using a combination of things from PowerShell to Prometheus to Grafana to actually build this view across all the stamps. If you want to learn more about this, Julian actually has a very nice set of articles that describes how these are put together and describes how you can go through something like this if you're interested and actually set one up for yourselves. Okay, so I'm here with Dino Bordonado from Bordonado IT and you helped Julian with their Azure Stack Hub platform for actually Knowledge Park and the Acquainted Health Service. Can you explain me a little bit more who you are, what your company does and how you actually helped Julian operating and architecting the Azure Stack solutions? Sure. Hi, Thomas. So my name is Dino Bordonado. I'm in IT for more than 25 years now, coming from Classic Hosting, Data Center and Outsourcing and my company transformed a couple of years ago to Cloud Platform and this is why we changed our company name to Multicloud Experts which means we are on Azure Stack Hub as well as Azure for a lot of years. Azure Stack Hub started on technical preview free and since this we are on the boat and love the product and we specialized on two different business areas. One of it is the operator as a service role to keep the trial and pain away from the customer to learn how to operate infrastructure in the right way and the second part, now that we know what infrastructure needs the customer has, it makes a lot of sense that we also offer the support on the platform on top of tenants as well as the consulting service and help the customer build awesome edge solution and most of the time even hybrid which are bridged to public Azure and this is what my company, we are 25 people located in Spire in Germany and we have customers all over Europe and even some outside Europe and we love what we do. That's awesome, now I remember I think that is also why I know you for such a long time is because you were very early involved with Azure Stack well, was it called back then and now Azure Stack Hub and I think you're also a Microsoft MVP awarded for your work you do with Azure and Azure Stack Hub so that's absolutely great. You mentioned that you're basically operating that one of your offerings is operating Azure Stack Hub and but also architecting integration and solutions can you explain me a little bit what that means and what the differences are? Yes, sure, this means that at the end of the day the customer have consistency across his platforms so when we build the platform for the customer we have a turnkey solution, we work close with OEMs like in this case Dell Technologies so we hand over the platform to the customer and in Julian's case with infrastructure it was just brainless for him, he could just use the same code he started to work in public Azure on their proof of concept and run it against the Azure Stack Hub platform and then transform from there his classic infrastructure from VMware with a lift and shift to the in first place Azure Stack Hub standard platform and then we started to leverage all these new possibilities like AKS Engine, Kubernetes and everything around it to start to cut the old monolith solution in slices and we helped them to find the best way and path step by step in different milestones to transform their future version of the software on the same platform as they were used to use already in a public cloud and that's the awesome thing about Azure Stack it's just out of one hand the first party solution that comes from Microsoft to your data center and it's not I run it on premises or I run it in Azure's public data center it's beside you can build very amazing cool stories around these platforms and this is what we try to use there for example we also had a couple of cool additional projects where we use Azure Front Door to get traffic in and then pump the traffic over express route to the Azure Stack Hub so that the very important high secure data is stored on the hubs and the CDNs and the static data and the websites are all hosted in public Azure so you have the cost and technology of best the best the best in bread of both worlds so you keep the costs down by using this easy service in public cloud and you have the high secure self-hosted platform of Azure Stack Hub but both are used in the same way with the same CI CD pipelines the same source codes and the same processes like you would use the public cloud you can just switch the private cloud with a slip of your finger by changing some settings in a JSON file and that's it I think I love that you just you just brought like all that together what I love about hybrid like when it comes down to like leveraging hybrid crowd environments right you get you take the advantage of the cloud services which you can run in Azure but also as you mentioned like on Azure Stack Hub itself and then you build them together and take it once okay let's say hey these services can actually run in the public cloud and we can take advantage of it but then at the same time the data which for example we have regulations in place where it just doesn't allow us to store data somewhere else we can actually keep them inside and we can still use the same tooling with Azure DevOps the same the same experience with Azure Resource Manager templates so I really think that is fantastic and again you brought it to the point how awesome that all of that can work together now maybe you have time like to explain me a little bit how you help with that solution and what your part was to working with with Julian on this and what you actually still provide like as a service for them yeah sure so as of today we run both of the Azure stacks day and night and 24-7 shift model with our team so we take care about the whole platform like alerts like patch and update marketplace management but even when it comes to resource planning for the future so we look with every customer that we onboard or with every project we onboard what other resources we use today we run the numbers what other resource usage maybe in 6 or 12 months from now capacity planning with the customer also as a service we help when it gets to finding problems in ARM templates debugging these but as well as we are trusted advisor and jump in every time Julian has a question about what is the best way to store my arm templates how should I structure my repositories for infrastructure as code should we jump to Terraform instead of ARM for example and we do very cool stuff around this and and we also have a lot of third party solutions like for example we had a business need SQL server cluster in a high availability setup and and SQL clusters produce a lot of traffic if you set up them wrong so we already we also put in some data platform MVPs and help got help from there to set up these clusters behind these medical systems and some other systems which don't have the technology for high availability we use it as a as a third party solution called availability and replicate data from one stem to the other and can switch over in a couple of minutes from one region to the other region without almost any data loss which brings like some kind of hyper view replica or Azure cyber cover free functionality which is not there yet to the stems by third party solution so my job is also to watch the market and always have the best solution so if there's no first hand solution for Microsoft we use carbonite if there's tomorrow for example as a side recovery I go to Julian say let's evaluate it make a proof concept and switch again back to the Microsoft way of doing it correct on this product and I see myself as a how do you call it maybe as some kind of guardian angel for the customer as a customer success manager however you want to call it but I'm responsible at Julian can can get his job done and I bring in a lot of experience about this and I would another part of this is also the friendship you spend so many days weeks and months together that also this relation here ended up in a very deep friendship by working over one and a half years on solution and this is what makes it very cool so I love the project I love the employees I love everything around it and when you work together that close and and you get friends in this that the quality that gets out of such a project is just amazing and by pain from operating the infrastructure platform and and you know it as well as me like what a magic as just a cop is yeah we come from days where we had hyper B with a system center and a Asia pack on top of it so this was a full-time job for many people just to orchestrate and keep the platform up and running and this is just out of the box by Microsoft at almost no cost compared with earlier days with much more functionality so it's just amazing to have this turnkey cloud in your own data center now I love what yours is saying again this is this is I think it's really key and you brought up the word trusted advisor I really like that I think if with with the world getting increasingly complex right and especially it environments getting increasingly complex to deal with all these traditional applications but then also very modern applications and then across different environments you need to have some sort of a trusted advisor which can help you to solve your challenges and I again I really like fascinating we all the work work you're doing and now this is right really I was thinking about this for a long time to ask you that question is what would be like your key to a key takeaways when you're working or when you start working with a customer what is like what are the most important things when you do a project and not just an Azure Stack Hub project but like an Azure hybrid project in general key takeaways actually are that in such projects when it comes to Azure Stack Hub and bring the application to Azure Stack Hub if you do it right you should be on the side of the customer and helping the customer take good decisions like for example the way Julian came to me was like hey we have this requirement for on-prem cloud platform and we had offers from various OEMs and OEM one says we need HDDs the other says we need SSDs the next says we need a hybrid and I'm more than confused I have the budget and I have to keep budget very structured and low as always because everyone wants to spend as little as possible but he was just not in a situation where he knew what is right and what is wrong and who is telling the truth and who just wanted to say it and so it was very clear that I sit beside my customer and take the decision like I would have the money myself and then from there on we took over and jumped to all these challenges we had with the project and everything was from day one from the feeling like I'm one of Julian's employees or colleagues so my key takeaways also on second part of it is that you need to bring all the people on the table so like when you run traditional infrastructure you have the silos you have the networking guys you have the storage guys you have the fire warning guys you have the infrastructure guys you have the whatever guys the SQL server guys and in these hybrid projects when it comes to infrastructure as code and software defined networks you need to have everyone on one table and you have you need to break the borders between these teams because it's not five single teams and silos anymore it's one big team and it's very very important that they speak with each other so you have to break out these these silos and help the people to talk actually to you're in some way from every perspective you're in the middle as the trusted advisor for almost everyone and in our case it was very helpful that we run data senders for more than 15 years now so we can be friend with almost everyone of the silos which which makes it very easy then to get a connection to the people and and get their concerns because a lot of people that run classic infrastructure they have no idea how how this cloud platform works but to to get that vulnerable and and and from from some concerns they have they don't they don't even try to ask how does this work is it secure and whatever they just say I don't want it I I'm just afraid it's new and I don't want to learn something new and for this they think it's no good choice of technology and when you then get into talks with these people and you hear for example like the networking guy says this is dangerous so it most is just I'm concerned to lose my job you need to talk to the people make them clear that the jobs change the roads change you get the opportunities you give some work to others but you get more work from others so there's enough work for everyone but probably the role changes somehow but there's nobody kicked out of a job because of a cloud platform this is nothing I've ever seen and and this is what I want to say you need to put on the trusted advisor in many cases and you need to communicate communicate with all the silos and people and then you do a great job. I think many times where you have these silos right and you can just not do a project with having these silos and different teams which are not really collaborating together and I think that is a great experience also what you can bring as with your personal experience when you work with a customer actually to tell them how not just in technology wise they need to bring stuff together but also how they should organize their teams to create an important part of your company. Yes. So you mentioned before you want to talk a little bit about the COE which you are a part of right? Yeah actually the COE is a very cool project that Tibi and I thought about and where it comes from is very simple so you have in many cases the ISVs with their software they want to bring to the Azure Stack Marketplace as well as you have customers who want to do a proof of concept and to get speed in this project and to not spend a lot of time on structure requirements that I just mentioned we talked to Dell Technologies and we've built this Microsoft send off excellence power by Dell Technology which is basically a full blown state of the art eight node Azure Stack Hub system with the large configuration with whatever you can we run 100G network on top of it we run 40 net firewalls and we are directly connected to the Frankfurt Internet D6 carrier which means we have a super fast connectivity when I say super fast I'm also talking about peering to Microsoft Azure so we peered the German Azure regions with two to three milliseconds of latency which is almost like they sit beside our Azure Stack Hub and we use the COE now as validation as a service for a couple of very cool software vendors to validate their solutions to bring workload like VDI to Azure Stack Hub not only to Azure and me and Tibi help them actually to get their software validated and get the marketplace filled up but we also help others to solve their problems so we make it very easy for those people to onboard get a subscription and test their solution and this is what we want to achieve to say Azure Stack Hub is an awesome product believe us and test it touch it try it and love it this is the idea behind it and that said Microsoft has a lot of things to make this process even better and like I said with the operator role already so even Microsoft now has cool projects for ISVs and IS in place and we are one of the first five of the first wave of these in the pre-ferred partner state so this gives us also for Microsoft a very cool label like saying modern our IT in Germany is one of these pre-ferred partners with all the requirements like dedicated stuff on Azure Stack Hub and with we help others bring the solution to the Azure Stack Hub system in our data center which is the COE and if someone wants to test the solution everyone is welcome contact me, contact Tibi, contact Thomas we can help you overnight. That sounds really great I think we will need to have a separate discussion on this and I think we definitely will. So with that I want to quickly ask you so if people want to know more about you or about the project itself where should they go? There are two places to go one is our personal website which is spotonaro-it.com the sendoff X is in the works which everybody also gets his own website and my own personal blog is also in the works which is dino.blog which is super easy to recognize so get there ping me on LinkedIn on Twitter so my Twitter hand list at dino botonaro the same for LinkedIn the same for Facebook just contact me on every channel you want I'm always glad to help as MVP community is my world so if someone needs help has question about Azure Stack Hub we also have our own German meetup which is called hypercloud meetup you can find it in the meetup platform you can find it on Twitter announcement so I'm glad for everyone who is interested in the technology and not only about Azure Stack Hub even Edge and even hybrid this is why we call our meetup even the hybrid meetup to build awesome solution on the Edge but not only on the Edge it can be hybrid Edge and public cloud combined. So with that I want to say thank you Dino thank you Julian for joining this video I really appreciate what you talked today and how you showed your solutions you built with Azure Stack and the Azure Stack Hub so all of you thank you for watching and hopefully see you in the next one thank you Thomas take care