 Don't laugh at me. I need to be like looking into the camera. This is the most difficult part, trust me is the intro because it's like so straight on point. Welcome to our Azure Stack Partner Solutions series. I'm here with Tiberiu Radu, also known as Tibi. He is a Principal Program Manager at the Intelligent Edge Solutions team. We are going to talk about Azure Stack Hub Solutions, delivered by our partners and service providers in a short video series. But before we actually going to talk about that, I want to give him the chance to basically explain what Azure Stack and what Azure Stack Hub actually is. Hi Thomas. Hello everyone. The Azure Stack Hub story started a few years ago, as we were looking at covering both the on-premises requirements of the world, the customers, as they were going through their journey to move to the Cloud, so to say. In the meantime, the Intelligent Cloud, Intelligent Edge story started to materialize growing from a hyperscale Cloud, which is Azure. You can look at it as a global computer, which is always available and has infinite scale. Then it goes through various devices all the way to very small microcontrollers, which are the Azure Steer devices. Now, in between these, we have the Azure Stack family of products. The Azure Stack family of products includes Azure Stack Hub, Azure Stack Edge, and Azure Stack HCI. Azure Stack Edge is a Cloud-managed appliance, meaning you can order it from the Azure portal, and it's intended to bring that compute power closer to the Edge where it's needed. So in cases like machine learning or where you have ID solutions, so that's what Azure Stack Edge is intended to do to bring that Cloud-managed appliance closer to the Edge. Azure Stack HCI is a hyper-convert solution, which is intended to provide a scalable virtualization and storage platform that's intended for scenarios like remote branch offices or where you have a high-performance workload in a traditional virtualization platform with the extension of the Cloud services towards it. So Azure services are extended towards the Azure Stack HCI and you're able to manage these resources from the Cloud as well as gain those hybrid capabilities. Azure Stack Hub is a Cloud-native integrated system. That means it brings the actual control plane of Azure down to the on-premises. So it works in fully disconnected scenarios, scenarios where you have data sovereignty or you're doing application modernization. You need to have the data on-premises, either in a certain geo or in a certain location. So Azure Stack Hub brings the services themselves to the premises of the customers. That's awesome. Thank you for explaining that. Again, I remember Ignite 2019 where Jason Sanders who is the engineering lead for all the Azure services came up and said basically in his keynote that we really believe that hybrid is an end-state for our customers and not just an in-between state until everything is moved to the Cloud. I know that there are very, very good reasons why customers want to deploy services and applications and not just in the Cloud, but also on their location in their own data center, at the edge or in their stores or wherever they are running services. So can you quickly explain a little bit why customers would actually deploy services in their locations? There are a number of reasons, but mostly we've seen three buckets out there, where they fit into. Data sovereignty or regulatory scenarios where due to some security reasons or regulations or whatever that the case might be, that data cannot leave the on-premises. Then there are the application modernization scenarios where you're looking to move certain parts of your application to something like a past services. So using app services or using some higher end service like a past service. So using the platform directly to provide that application modernization. Then you have the scenarios where you have a connected or a completely disconnected Cloud running in your premises. All of these you keep a consistent application development as well as operations across your public estate, as well as your private estate. So the on-premises would leverage the same. You would have operational consistency across your public and your private Cloud. But when you're considering the Azure Stack family of products, then the hybrid use cases also evolve with that family of products. So those three components, although you find parts of them in these use cases that we're showing now, they are building up towards a more complex hybrid use cases. You're leveraging each component of the family for specific reasons. When you're closer to the edge, you would go with Azure Stack Edge. When you're using more of a traditional virtualization platform enhanced by the Cloud in certain areas you would use Azure Stack ACI. When you need the full power of the control plane of Azure services running in your premises, either in a connected or a disconnected manner, then you would use Azure Stack Hub specifically. Then the networking aspect of things, these are solutions that need to be close application, for example. So if you have a latency issue, if you have a bandwidth issue or you have a remote location that has a long path to go through to an Azure region, and Azure regions are coming up all over the world, and more and more are being deployed. But still, there are places where connectivity is an issue and having that better latency helps. Yeah. No, absolutely. I agree with these. I heard that from many, many customers that these are, for example, the reasons why they also want to run certain workloads in their own location. I also had a customer where we were actually talking about, for example, factories or stores where they just didn't want to take the dependency on their internet connectivity to the Cloud where they just want to have something there. They're still going to use the Cloud for processing power in the long-term or in the mid-term, but they don't want to close down their store or factory just because the internet connectivity is not available. Now, with the Azure Stack portfolio, and especially with Azure Stack Hub, we get that in-between piece from where you need these Cloud skills, but also you have these traditional on-prem skills. We see a lot of people going out and the need to migrate these services, for example, to Azure, but also especially to Azure Stack Hub, you need to have certain set of skills. You need to have these modern Cloud skills, as I mentioned, but then also understand these traditional workloads and also operate, for example, the Azure Stack Hub solution. This is where we're going to talk about in this series. We have different partner solutions and partners which help us with this. Can you explain a little bit what partners these are and what help they can deliver for our customers? The operator role is something very specific to Azure Stack Hub. We try to be very conscious about staying away from the administrator name because in a traditional virtualization platform, you would have a administrator actually managing everything from the hardware all the way up to the actual application. With Azure Stack Hub, you have an operator which needs to operate the platform on top of which you have the various workloads deployed. This offers from a user perspective, from the person that consumes these services, it's going to look and feel just like Azure and it has that consistent approach of deploying from things as simple as deploying an ARM template to deploying solutions all up. Now, the thing which is different from Azure is the operator side of things. Because in Azure, obviously you have the Azure teams that are managing the platform itself. But on Azure Stack Hub, you would have these operators actually managing the platform itself. For this, there are specific things which make sense from an Azure perspective and knowing Azure and knowing Azure infrastructure, IaaS platform does help towards this, but there are specific knowledge that you also need to cover for this. The way we've approached this over the last couple of years is essentially we're seeing two types of customers. There are ones which are looking at things from a self-service perspective, meaning they have their own IT teams and they are ramping up those teams towards understanding the operator role and learning about the operator role. Then we have a more of a managed service approach where you have a partner which is a service provider, it could be a CSP, an MSP, an SI, whoever it is, that's managing that platform for you, and then you're just consuming the things which are on top of it. For the self-service side of the world, as we started the journey with the early adopter programs, we came up with a number of documents, white papers, videos, guidance on how to actually operate an Azure Stack Hub. These set of documents, we've grouped them together in what it's called the Azure Stack Foundational Series. These are a set of learning videos that help somebody go from knowing Azure IaaS all the way to understanding what an operator role actually is. These are something like 16 hours worth of content, and they are all doubled by the operator workshops where we've published a set of guides that an operator would get more hands-on experience with Azure Stack Hub. Understand what the differences are, understand how the platform itself is managed, all the way to how do you troubleshoot and how do you create a support packet and things like this. These documents help somebody have a glimpse into what an operator actually is and what the Azure Stack Hub operator actually needs to do. That's awesome. I've seen those guides and those videos, and I absolutely love the content we have there. It really helps to understand how you actually operate the Azure Stack Hub infrastructure, if you will, in a way where, as you said, you don't have to do everything, right? Azure Stack Hub is really like an appliance, but there's still certain things you need to know how to operate. This is great. I know that we also talked about when it comes to partner solutions and managed service providers. One topic very often comes up is migration, or as you also say, it's very important not just to talk about migration but also modernization. Can you highlight there a little bit more about what the offers are there and what solutions we have there? From a migration standpoint, you shouldn't be talking about migration as a lift and shift only. When if you would just move that virtual machine over on Azure Stack Hub, that's not, you're not taking advantage of the whole platform, and you're not taking advantage of what's offered from the platform. We've actually came up with a blog series that highlights how Azure Stack Hub at its core is an IaaS platform, and the things that are exposed through the platform itself, out of the box, so to say, and how it helps modernize those applications. Now, in terms of an actual migration, there are things as simple as creating an ARM template. Instead of deploying a certain application, just install the VM, deploy the application, figuring out the settings, and then giving that to your customers, you can automate the whole thing with an ARM template. In some cases, we've seen customers go from days worth of time that it took to figure out how to deploy that application, because separate teams would need to be involved down to tens of minutes, because everything would be standardized inside an ARM template, and deployed end-to-end. When one team needs to change something, they would just come in, change that respective bit, and everything would be sorted. So, from a migration perspective, it's always about migration and modernization. To highlight this, in the next couple of weeks, the Azure Stack Hub will be listed as one of the migration targets for the CAF set of documents. CAF is the Cloud Adoption Framework, and this helps enterprise customers and customers all up with their Azure journey. It's a pretty massive set of documents, and it includes a number of things. It focuses on the Azure migrations, but we will have a set of Azure Stack Hub-specific guidance materials that will help customers with their Azure Stack Hub journey as well. That is fantastic. I'm really looking forward to that, because when I speak to customers, especially when they want to set up their hybrid environment, they are looking for that guidance, and having that in the Cloud Adoption Framework really, really helps. I also want to quickly ask you, we talked a lot about the partner solutions for Azure Stack Hub. If I want to find these solutions, is there a way to get these solutions? Definitely. Everything we've mentioned so far sort of fits into the self-service bucket, if you want. This is with the appropriate aircoats, of course, but this is where you learn, you build that muscle to actually have a migration and modernization story, as well as operate the Azure Stack Hub itself. Now, if you are looking for having a managed service approach, we have came up with a list of partners that offer these services, and these are service providers that offer this managed services approach. That means they will operate the Azure Stack Hub for you. In some cases, they even go further than that, and they help you with the migrations or they help you with the application modernization pieces, meaning if you're looking to rewrite your application and move it to take advantage of the cloud, the PAD services and the things that the cloud exposes, they would help you with those as well. So, this set of partners are offering this as a managed services approach. We also have a number of ISVs listed in this website, which are the partners that are building solutions on top of Azure Stack Hub. So, these are solutions running on Azure Stack Hub and taking advantage of the platform one way or another. In some cases, they're extending the capabilities that the cloud has. In others, they're adding their own specific vertical solutions on top. That's perfect. And again, these are the two types of partners. We're actually going to have a look in this Azure Stack Partner Solutions video series. So, we'll have both service providers but also ISV solutions to make your Azure Stack Hub deployment even better. So, before we actually go out and close this, I want to ask you, for people who want to learn more about Azure Stack Hub, especially about the migration guidance as well as the partner solutions, what would you recommend? What's the next step, except for watching our video series? There are various levels of guidance out there. They start from the foundational series. They add on top the workshops and the guidance that is described in these workshops and then go all the way to things like the tech communities where we have a common space that we're publishing articles across the Azure Stack family of products. And then even on Twitter, where most of the PMs are present one way or another on Twitter, we tend to post new things on Twitter and we have various updates there as well. Now, there's also a number of MVPs, for example, that are publishing articles and they're publishing their own content that enhances this. And there are a set of guides which you've actually created that help with the migration and these are a set of videos that help with the migration and how to think about the migration all up. And these give you the set of articles that you can use as a self-service sort of an approach. If that's not the way you're looking for and you're looking for a managed service, then our service providers can help you with that as well. Now, this is awesome. Thank you very much for all these resources. Again, I really appreciate when I work with or when I work with the Azure Stack team or the Intelligent Edge solution team is like the responsiveness and the way we can actually engage, right? And there's a ton of content out there which help our customers to be successful with their deployments. So thank you very much, Tibi. Thank you very much for having you. In the next coming videos, we will talk more about the different Azure Stack Hub partner solutions. So tune in for the next one. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.