Technology, despite its benefits, can often present numerous challenges, whether that’s integrating it with existing tech in the stack or in moving applications from a test and development environment to live production.
With so many technologies being run by businesses in their stack, managing them can be a challenge.
One of the technologies that have presented challenges to IT is Microsoft Azure. While Azure has increased its market share and is clearly a popular choice in the cloud market, users have on occasion struggled with the management of it.
The problem with having a complex management environment for any of the technology that a business uses is that it eats into the resources with regards to both time, and how much budget it is spent.
Businesses are faced with needing engineers and SysAdmins to handle elements such as OS patching, troubleshooting, architecture design, security, virtual machine monitoring, configuring backing, load balance monitoring and much more.
It should be said that this problem isn’t unique to Azure, but given its market size, around 9% according to Synergy Research, and the omnipresence of Microsoft in the world, users that have had problems with Azure management are more visible.
Often issues stem from the launch of new features but the Azure interface has come in for plenty of criticism this year for its user interface.
According to IDG Research, IT continues to spend 68% of its time on routine maintenance instead of innovation and for 40% of IT organisations allocating too many resources to maintain existing environments is a top factor prohibiting innovation. This is despite an increased shift to the cloud.
For many, offloading things like operations, monitoring, and patching to a managed cloud provider can help to remove some of this burden, but many organisations want the management to stay under their control and simply want it to be easier.
The problems for managing Azure are somewhat understandable given the vast amount of services and flexibility it is trying to offer.
Given that Microsoft is aiming to eventually surpass Amazon Web Services as the dominant cloud player, the company has unsurprisingly produced a number of management tools, as have third-party vendors and the open source community.
Recently, Microsoft revealed the Windows Azure Pack connector, which is a way for administrators to use one portal to manage IaaS virtual machines in both private clouds and public Azure subscriptions.
The single pane of glass approach is one that is popular for its simplicity. SysAdmins just have to look at one management screen rather than flicking between numerous ones for the different services being used.
Microsoft also offers Azure portal and Azure classic portal as a way for users to manage cloud services.
In addition to the portals the company has developed Azure Management Libraries. These are a collection of REST wrapper assemblies that compose together with a common library and shared dependencies in order to offer service automation, management, and SaaS capabilities to Azure developers.
The idea behind these products is to increase the simplicity of managing Azure.
The problem though, is that cloud management remains more complex than it should be, especially when considering that cloud is pitched as providing simplicity, removing complexity, lowering cost, and increasing agility.
A number of those benefits are lost if the management of the service is more complex than it should be.
An alternative route to managing the service itself is to go down the route of employing a managed cloud provider.
Rackspace, which offers fanatical support for Microsoft Azure is one company, out of many, that offers to manage an Azure deployment. Rackspace is essentially offering to use its own Microsoft-certified experts to deal with all the complexities that IT faces.
The company offers a 15-minute response time SLA in addition to monitoring and automation services so that the business can choose how much is being managed.
Going down the managed cloud route will for many businesses be an appealing solution, especially when considering the average annual salaries for roles related to managing Azure.
A solutions architect on average brings in $121,251, while a senior systems engineer takes home on average $97,296; a Windows systems administrator’s average salary is $62,706. These figures, according to PayScale, highlight the expensive nature of even getting the right skilled people in to run the service.
As Microsoft Azure is only around six years old, it is still in its early days and so work to simplify the management of it will be on-going. A lot of work has been done already and given Microsoft’s long history, it is likely to get it right sooner rather than later.
The value of ease of management shouldn’t be underestimated as it can be a key differentiator between cloud vendors that could be the difference between a customer win and losing out to a major competitor.
