Microsoft’s Shift to DevOps
I attended Microsoft Ignite 2018 at Orlando, FL. It was a really great conference because I got to network with Microsoft’s CSEO (Core Services Engineering and Operations) Team. This was Microsoft’s IT Operations Team before the transition to all things Azure Cloud and DevOps. I spoke with Dana Baxter, Service Manager, and Rajesh Vasireddy, Program Manager and Engineer extraordinaire. Two very intelligent and helpful individuals. They did multiple presentations on their transition to devops and Azure.
Main takeaways:
Buy-in has to be from the very top and every level below must be held accountable by those at the top. To transition to DevOps, Microsoft went through key phases - it didn’t just happen overnight and they experienced pain points, just like any other organization will. Initially, IT Operations managed all the subscriptions for all the Microsoft Teams and the teams would have to answer to IT Operations. Do you see the problem with this? People went rogue. They started using their own credit cards to buy their own subscriptions. So, how did IT Operations reel in the rebels? They didn’t. What happened was enough teams had security incidents, infrastructure problems, etc and had to ask IT Operations for help. Want our help? Come back into our subscriptions.
But this model is still very similar to the old model of Operations, just in cloud instead of on-prem. It’s a transition point to DevOps. (If Microsoft is using Azure and that’s its own product, isn’t it still on-prem? hehe.).
So, how did Microsoft fully implement DevOps? Their IT Operations team focused on empowering their users to manage their own subscriptions by developing monitoring and alert toolkits. With a simple click, a Microsoft team could install 100+ policies and alerts to help them manage their own Azure infrastructure. There was also a lot of training, hand-holding and support until the teams realized that they had become self-sufficient. In the end, every team has their own subscriptions, they monitor their own environment and CSEO has reporting and monitoring that hooks into all the individual subscriptions in order to provide org-wide reporting.
At KS, we are building out Azure for dev and prod. We are positioning ourselves to be the cloud broker for the org. This is the transition phase that Microsoft went through, except we’ll be offering services for AWS and Google.
Ignite presentations by these two superstars are available here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cseo-ignite-2018-dana-baxter/