April 2022 - Seite 6 von 43 - Cloud Computing Köln

With more than 2.5 million customers, Italian utility company A2A is committed to delivering electricity, gas, clean water, and waste collection every day. More recently, the company made another significant commitment: To incorporate the principles of the “circular economy” into its way of doing business — part of the UN 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable-Development Goals — all while also aiming to double its client base by 2030. Growing rapidly but sustainably requires operating as efficiently as possible at every level of the organization, from operating smart meters to generating accurate demand projections. That’s why A2A chose to deploy its SAP S/4HANA ERP and the SAP BW/4HANA data warehouse on Google Cloud.Roadblocks to innovationInstead of a linear consumption model that starts with raw materials and ends with use and disposal, the circular economy is a continuous cycle that emphasizes repair, recycling, and the creation of materials rather than their disposal. To take an example from A2A’s own success story: The company keeps 99.7 percent of collected waste out of landfills.1 Of the UN’s sustainability goals, A2A is committing to the three most relevant to its industries: Ensuring availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for allEnsuring sustainable consumption and production patternsProtecting, restoring, and promoting sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystemsAchieving A2A’s sustainability and customer-first strategies requires high scalability, rapid data ingestion, and rich, accurate analytics. None of this could be reliably supported with the company’s legacy on-premises SAP and Data Warehouse, especially given A2A’s projected growth and the increasing complexity of the data landscape, including IoT deployments and energy market liberalization. Provisioning data infrastructure was also slow and complex. Simply adding a new metric could require increasing capacity by an order of magnitude. And analytical and transactional data lived in siloes, which created a fragmented and out-of-date view of each customer across sales and customer support teams. A2A’s fragmented data also made it difficult to take proactive action when changing priorities or processes required shifting focus from one data source to another. With a data warehouse that refreshed only once every 24 hours, simple processes such as responding to a customer calling because their power has been cut off due to an unpaid bill became cumbersome. Scalability was also a concern. With the on-premises solution, A2A needed to define the budget for its data warehouse over a two-year timeframe, but the rollout of new electricity meters — each sending data every 10 minutes — across Italy made those data requirements hard to predict. The move to the cloud: From monolith to microservicesThe move has been a giant step forward in A2A’s goal of meeting its data-driven, customer-centric strategy. In deploying its SAP systems to Google Cloud, A2A can take advantage of a highly flexible hybrid environment and powerful data management and analytics. It can replicate data from Salesforce, SAP, and other systems in BigQuery, which operates as a data lake with Google Cloud SQL, connected directly to Google Analytics and Google Ads for data-driven customer service, decision-making, and marketing. “From BigQuery we can feed relevant information directly to the people who need it. Our customer operators work on Salesforce, so we use an OData protocol to embed real-time data in that platform. Elsewhere, we present the information through a dashboard, or with a BI component delivering one-page reports.” —Vito Martino, Head of CRM, Marketing and Sales B2C & B2B, A2ABy running SAP on Google Cloud, A2A can also count on an infrastructure platform that provides:Scalability. The robust data architecture on Google Cloud adapts to shifting and increasing demands without compromising on speed or availability, so A2A doesn’t have to worry about over- or under-provisioning as the rollout of smart meters proceeds.Speed. The new A2A data solution refreshes every five minutes instead of 24 hours, so the company can respond to its customers’ needs without delays. Customer operators working in Salesforce now receive real-time data from Google BigQuery so that, when a customer calls, operators can see accurate information in seconds. They can now offer value-added services and sustainable options tailored to the customer’s needs, from energy consumption to their preferred method of communication.Availability. With microservices orchestrated by Google Kubernetes Engine, the team can update the solution through continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), eliminating the need for downtime when changes are required.Security and control. The A2A IT team uses Google Kubernetes Engine to orchestrate clusters of instances on Google Compute Engine, with Google Cloud Load Balancing and backups on Google Cloud Persistent Disk. Google Cloud Anthos ensures operational consistency across on-premises and cloud platforms.Ready to grow the sustainable wayBy moving to Google Cloud — the industry’s cleanest cloud, with zero net emissions — A2A is ready to grow quickly while locking down the efficiency it will need to meet its ambitious sustainability goals. “To bring sustainable utilities to market, we need to be both responsive to our customers and responsive to the internal needs of A2A,” explains Davide Rizzo, Head of IT Governance and Strategy at A2A. “Understanding what customers need in detail means we can improve their services and reduce their environmental impact at the same time.” Learn moreabout the ways Google Cloud can transform your organization’s SAP solutions with scalability, speed, and advanced analytics capabilities.1. Circular Economy: one of the four founding pillars of A2A’s 2030 sustainability policy | DrupalRelated Article6 SAP companies driving business results with BigQuerySAP systems generate large amounts of key operational data. Learn how six Google Cloud customers are leveraging BigQuery to drive value f…Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

27. April 2022

da Agency

Service Catalog: Introducing version selection for Terraform solutions

Enterprise IT admins use Google Cloud Service Catalog Terraform solutions to establish curated catalogs of self-serve Google Cloud infrastructure for their organizations. Now, with support for multiple Terraform versions for Service Catalog solutions, administrators create and validate their deployment configs with a particular version of Terraform. The version selected is used by the Service Catalog to perform the deployment, ensuring end users enjoy a seamless experience when deploying a Service Catalog Terraform solution. This feature also enables both the admins and the platform to take advantage of the most recent capabilities available in Terraform, allowing them to quickly address any compliance concerns that may be present in previous releases.Let’s take a closer look at what is included in this release.Terraform version selectionWith this release, admins can select a specific Terraform version when adding a new Terraform solution to a catalog. The version configuration, once applied, can be viewed on the following pages:Solutions Listings Solution DetailsSolution Deployment HistoryCatalog end users will automatically utilize the version selected by the catalog admin. Different solutions within the same catalog may incorporate different corresponding versions of Terraform, based on an admin’s selection.Version SelectionRelated ArticlePrivate Catalog: Improving Terraform deployment management experiencesWith this release, Private Catalog admins can use Terraform configurations to keep end users informed about updates.Read ArticleGet started with Service CatalogThese new features are available now to all Service Catalog customers. To learn how to use these features, refer to our documentation:Create a Terraform configuration in Service CatalogManage and update your Terraform configurations in Service CatalogRelated ArticleA look at the new Google Cloud Marketplace Private Catalog, now with Terraform supportThe latest version of Private Catalog simplifies management for the products you use from Google Cloud Marketplace.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

27. April 2022

da Agency

Running VMware in the cloud: How Google Cloud VMware Engine stacks up

Google Cloud VMware Engine delivers an enterprise-grade, cloud-native VMware experience that is built on Google Cloud’s highly performant and scalable infrastructure. By enabling a consistent VMware experience, the service allows customers to adopt Google Cloud rapidly, easily, and with minimal modifications to their vSphere workloads, bringing the best of VMware and Google Cloud together on one platform for a variety of use-cases. These include rapid data center exit, application lift and shift, disaster recovery, virtual desktop infrastructure, or modernization at your own pace. Here are seven ways VMware Engine outshines alternatives for running your VMware workloads in the cloud, simplify your operations, and help you innovate faster:1. Dedicated 100Gbps east-west networking Google Cloud VMware Engine nodes come with redundant switching and dedicated 100Gbps east-west networking with no oversubscription of bandwidth, unlike other options where there is generally oversubscription. This is especially important when it comes to running latency-sensitive workloads. 2. Four 9’s of availability in a single zone The service offers 99.99% uptime SLA for a cluster in a single Zone with five to 16 nodes and FTT=2 or more without the need for stretched clusters, which is higher than the alternatives. Further, dedicated connectivity for core service functions such as vSAN and vMotion enables better solution stability and availability. This enables the service to support the needs of enterprise workloads that require high availability.Note: “Cluster” means a deployment of three or more dedicated bare metal nodes running VMware ESXi and associated networking managed via management interfaces.3. Global networking without complex routingGoogle Cloud VMware Engine networking is built based on Google Cloud’s powerful networking architecture. With simplified regional and global routing modes—which allow a VPC’s subnets to be deployed in any region where our service is available—you can architect global networks without the need or overhead of creating and connecting regional network designs. You get instant, direct Layer 3 access between them. In alternative cloud environments, you may have to configure special networking between regions, often requiring VPN-based tunnels over the WAN to enable global uniform network communication. This adds to the deployment and operational complexity, in addition to cost.4. Integrated multi-VPC networkingUsers often have application deployments in different VPC networks, such as separate dev/test and production environments or multiple administrative domains across business units. The service supports “many-to-many” access from VPC networks to Google Cloud VMware Engine networks with multi-VPC networking, allowing you to retain existing deployed architectures and extend them flexibly to your VMware environments. In addition, by providing multi-VPC networking, you can pool their VMware needs—say for QA and dev—to a smaller set of clusters, effectively reducing their costs.For more information about the end-to-end networking capabilities and services available in Google Cloud VMware Engine, please refer to the Private Cloud Networking for Google Cloud VMware Engine whitepaper. Here, you’ll find details about network flows, configuration options, and the differentiated benefits of running your VMware workloads in Google Cloud.5. Unified, cloud-integrated model Google Cloud VMware Engine is a fully managed Google first-party service, operated and supported by Google and its world-class team. With fully integrated identities, billing, and access control, you have a simpler end-to-end experience that is different from other services. You access Google Cloud VMware Engine service via the Google Cloud console, like any other Google Cloud service. You can also access other native Google Cloud services privately from your VMware private cloud running in Google Cloud VMware Engine over local connections.6. Flexibility in third-party ecosystem compatibility With Google Cloud VMware Engine, you can set up existing VMware on-premises third-party tools or products that require additional privileges by using a solution user account. This uniquely enables operational consistency, ensuring that the tools you have invested in and used over the years work on Google Cloud VMware Engine. Furthermore, in key areas such as vSAN data encryption, you have the choice of not only using Google Cloud Key Management Service (KMS)—which is turned on by default on vSAN datastores—but also external KMS providers such as HyTrust, Thales, and Fortanix. 7. Dense nodes with high storage:core and memory:core ratios and fast provisioningGoogle Cloud VMware Engine nodes are dense. Each node is powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors and comes with 36 cores, 72 hyperthreaded cores, 768 GB memory, 19.2 TB NVMe data and 3.2 TB NVMe cache storage. This, along with oversubscription, leads to high consolidation ratios and compelling storage:core per dollar and memory:core per dollar. In addition, you can rapidly spin up these nodes in a VMware private cloud often in under an hour, enabling on-demand, VMware-consistent capacity in Google Cloud for your needs.These are just a few examples of customer-centric innovation that set Google Cloud VMware Engine infrastructure apart. In addition, migrating to Google cloud can save you up to 38% in TCO.Get started by learning about Google Cloud VMware Engine and your options for migration, or talk to our sales team to join the customers who have embarked upon this journey.The authors would like to thank the Google Cloud VMware Engine product team for their contributions on this blog.Related ArticleSave big by temporarily suspending unneeded Compute Engine VMs—now GARealize huge savings by suspending temporarily unneeded VMs on Google Compute Engine and resume where you left off at a later time.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

27. April 2022

da Agency

Azure Cost Management and Billing updates – April 2022

Whether you're a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you're spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management and Billing comes in.

We're always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Azure Cost Management and Billing can help you better understand where you're accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Summarized totals in the cost analysis preview
Download your Azure prices as a ZIP file
Unlock cloud savings on the fly with autoscale on Azure
What's new in Cost Management Labs
New ways to save money with Azure
New videos and learning opportunities
Documentation updates
Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team

Let's dig into the details.

Summarized totals in the cost analysis preview

I’ve talked about how the cost analysis preview is the future of analytics and insights in Cost Management. While what we have today is a solid foundation that most prefer over classic cost analysis, there’s still a lot left before we can fully replace the classic experience. This month’s update is one small step in that direction with the addition of the Total, Average, and Budget key performance indicators (KPIs) at the top of cost analysis.

The Total KPI shows the summarized total across all rows. If you have charges in multiple currencies, cost is normalized to USD to show an overall total. Most views default to show actual, billed charges. The Reservations view shows amortized costs to break down and allocate your reservation purchases to the resources that received the prepurchase benefit. As a reminder, if you’d like to switch to amortized cost from another view, you can select the Customize command at the top to switch. Learn more about amortization, see View amortized reservation costs.

The Average KPI shows the average daily cost for the period. If your period includes the current day, the average is calculated up to and including yesterday, but does not include partial cost from the current day since the data for the day is not complete. Keep in mind every service submits usage at different timelines which will impact the average calculation. Learn more about data latency and refresh processing at Understand Cost Management data.

The Budget KPI shows the monthly budget you have configured with a quick link to edit the budget. If you don’t have a budget yet, you’ll see a link to create a new budget. Budgets created from the cost analysis preview are preconfigured with alerts when your cost exceeds 50 percent, 80 percent, and 95 percent of your cost or 100 percent of your forecast for the month. You can add additional recipients or update alerts from the Budgets page.

You may have seen these rolling out over the past few months, but they are now available to everyone. If you’re interested in what’s coming next, check out What’s new in Cost Management Labs below. Labs includes additional previews you might be interested in, like charts and grouping related resources. Check out the latest updates in cost analysis preview and let us know what you’d like to see next.

Download your Azure prices as a ZIP file

One important aspect of optimizing cost is comparing prices across different resource SKUs and regions. This can be cumbersome when using the portal or Azure pricing calculator but is a perfect scenario for automation with the Cost Management Price Sheets API. Now you can download your Azure prices as a ZIP file with multiple, smaller CSV files to make parsing the file easier. This helps avoid issues where the file can grow too big to be opened in tools like Microsoft Excel.

Learn more about the Price Sheets API and update your scripts today.

Unlock cloud savings on the fly with autoscale on Azure

Unused cloud resources can put an unnecessary drain on your computing budget, and unlike legacy on-premises architectures, there is no need to over-provision compute resources for times of heavy usage.

Autoscaling is one of the value levers that can help unlock cost savings for your Azure workloads by automatically scaling up and down the resources in use to better align capacity to demand. This practice can greatly reduce wasted spend for those dynamic workloads with inherently “peaky” demand.

To learn more, read Unlock cloud savings on the fly with autoscale on Azure.

What's new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what's coming in Azure Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share feedback and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Cost Management Labs:

New: Cost Management tutorials
Whether you’re just getting started or looking to learn more about specific features, tutorials are now a click away from the Cost Management overview in Cost Management Labs.
Update: Access preview views from classic cost analysis – Now available in the public portal
Get one-click access to the new preview views from classic cost analysis in the View menu. You can see this in classic cost analysis in Cost Management Labs.
Update: Average cost in the cost analysis preview – Now available in the public portal
See your average daily cost at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
Update: Budgets in the cost analysis preview – Now available in the public portal
Quickly create and edit budgets directly from the cost analysis preview. If you don’t have a budget yet, you’ll see a suggested budget based on your forecast. You can opt in using Try Preview.
Update: Anomaly detection alerts – Now enabled by default in Labs
Subscribe to automatic email alerts when a new anomaly has been detected. Anomaly detection is only available for subscriptions in the cost analysis preview. You can opt into this preview using Try Preview and then configure anomaly alerts from the Alerts page.
Update: Grouping SQL databases and elastic pools – Now enabled by default in Labs
Get an at-a-glance view of your total SQL costs by grouping SQL databases and elastic pools under their parent server in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
Charts in the cost analysis preview
View your daily or monthly cost over time in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
View cost for your resources
The cost for your resources is one click away from the resource overview in the preview portal. Just click View cost to quickly jump to the cost of that particular resource.
Change scope from the menu
Change scope from the menu for quicker navigation. You can opt-in using Try Preview.

Of course, that's not all. Every change in Azure Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it's in the full Azure portal. We're eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you'd like to see next. What are you waiting for? Try Cost Management Labs today.

New ways to save money with Azure

Lots of cost optimization improvements over the last month! Here are some of the generally available offers you might be interested in:

On-demand capacity reservations for virtual machines.
Ebsv5 virtual machines increase remote storage performance.
Azure HBv3 virtual machines for HPC now upgraded.
Cosmos DB autoscale RU/s entry point is 4x lower.
Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server now supports more high availability regions and US Gov Virginia and US Gov Arizona for Azure Government.
Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server in China East 2 and China North 2.
Azure Batch supports Spot Virtual Machines.
IBM WebSphere on Azure with evaluation licensing.
Azure Stream Analytics in 10 new regions.

And here are some of the new previews:

Capacity reservation support in AKS.
Azure Dedicated Host support in AKS.
Arm64-based virtual machines can deliver up to 50% better price-performance.
NC A100 v4 virtual machines accelerate AI applications.
Virtual machines with Ampere Altra Arm-based processors.
DCsv3 virtual machines available in Switzerland and West US.
Azure SignalR Service Premium tier.

New videos and learning opportunities

Here are a couple new videos you might be interested in:

Reduce your costs with Azure Spot Virtual Machines (18 minutes).
Announcing Microsoft Azure FX Series Virtual Machine General Availability (2 minutes).

Follow the Azure Cost Management and Billing YouTube channel to stay in the loop with new videos as they’re released and let us know what you'd like to see next.

Want a more guided experience? Start with Control Azure spending and manage bills with Azure Cost Management and Billing.

Documentation updates

Here are a few documentation updates you might be interested in:

New: Prepay for Virtual machine software reservations.
New: View amortized reservation costs.
Identify anomalies and unexpected changes in cost now covers anomaly detection.
Analyze Azure costs with the Power BI App includes details about how cost may differ from the EA portal.
Save and share customized views includes a note about how many views you can save.

Want to keep an eye on all of the documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request.

Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team

Are you excited about helping customers and partners better manage and optimize costs? We're looking for passionate, dedicated, and exceptional people to help build best in class cloud platforms and experiences to enable exactly that. If you have experience with big data infrastructure, reliable and scalable APIs, or rich and engaging user experiences, you'll find no better challenge than serving every Microsoft customer and partner in one of the most critical areas for driving cloud success.

Watch the video below to learn more about the Azure Cost Management and Billing team:

Join our team.

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don't forget to check out the previous Azure Cost Management and Billing updates. We're always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow @AzureCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. You can also share ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum or join the research panel to participate in a future study and help shape the future of Azure Cost Management and Billing.

We know these are trying times for everyone. Best wishes from the Azure Cost Management and Billing team. Stay safe and stay healthy.
Quelle: Azure