Datacenters: Local and Cloud

0:00So I just got finished with a work trip here.

0:03I'm still in Orlando, Florida, but I went to a conference here,

0:06and a lot of the emphasis was on Microsoft products

0:09and, of course, Azure,

0:11as well as other underlying products from Azure,

0:15such as Intune, EntryD, what else?

0:18Purview, lots of those kinds of things.

0:20Anyway, it was astounding to me that a lot of times

0:25the presenter would ask for a raise of hands

0:27asking how many people were in the cloud.

0:30And there were still a lot of people

0:31that did not have presence in the cloud,

0:34at least not in any significant way.

0:36And a lot of that, I think, comes up from mistrust.

0:39In fact, when I was at lunch,

0:41I talked to an administrator who's actually from Germany.

0:43He's probably about my age,

0:44so he's pretty old and experienced in IT.

0:47And he said, oh, no, you can't trust the cloud.

0:49It's on the internet.

0:50Well, wait a minute.

0:53Is your own data center also on the internet?

0:55Yes.

0:56Well, you're also on the internet,

0:58so how, you know, the same problem might exist

1:00if you're just concerned about being on the internet.

1:03And I think that's one of the paradigm shifts

1:05that we as administrators have to face.

1:07Now, I do want to point out,

1:08what I'm going to show you here in a lot of this skill

1:11is not directly coming from the exam objectives

1:14of the AB 900 course.

1:16The reason why I'm showing you this

1:18is because I think some of us need

1:20kind of a warmup into the cloud.

1:22So we're already all invested in the cloud

1:25to some degree, right?

1:26I mean, you've got maybe a Dropbox account.

1:28If you've got an iPhone like I do,

1:31then you're already on, you know, Apple's cloud, iCloud.

1:35Any photo that you take gets uploaded

1:37usually automatically to the cloud.

1:39So we're all on a consumer level cloud of some type.

1:41But when it comes to our servers and data centers

1:44and all that stuff,

1:45that's when people sometimes get nervous.

1:47So we're going to take a look

1:48at kind of the paradigm shift here

1:50and hopefully get us warmed up to the cloud.

1:53So first of all, what do we got going on here?

1:56On-premises, okay, what do we have on-premises?

1:58Well, all the things you would normally expect to see, right?

2:01So we've got servers on-premises.

2:02You know, maybe you have a big rack like this,

2:05maybe multiple racks,

2:06depending on the size of your organization.

2:07In some organizations, the server, quote unquote,

2:10I'm trying to fit my air quotes

2:12inside of this tiny little circle right here.

2:13Anyway, sometimes the server in a small organization

2:17might be the computer

2:18that's underneath the receptionist's desk.

2:21In other places, you might have a server closet.

2:23I've been in smaller organizations

2:25where we did have a server closet.

2:27Wasn't designed as a server room in any way,

2:31didn't have adequate ventilation and cooling

2:34and stuff like that.

2:34And yes, we burned up a server once,

2:37at least the hard drives on that server.

2:39It was all we could do though, because it's a long story,

2:42but we were in a temporary space

2:43while you're waiting to move

2:44into a more modern office building.

2:46And that was the only place we could do it.

2:47Anyway, you may also have your own data center

2:50if you're in a larger organization.

2:51You might have a space that's rigged specifically

2:55for data center purposes.

2:56It's got the right cooling.

2:57It's got the right power.

2:59It's got maybe some security measures also in place.

3:02So you might already have all of that.

3:04You may have that for your servers.

3:05Then you also have, oh my gosh, I just noticed this.

3:08This will be fun.

3:08Look, I think I can take my head

3:10and put it on top of this guy right down here.

3:12Okay, so let's have fun with that one.

3:14All right, so anyway, what else have we got going on?

3:16So you've got your desktops.

3:18Now, to a large degree, and I'm gonna move this back

3:20before it drives us all nuts.

3:23You're saying your floating head's

3:24already driving me nuts, James.

3:25Anyway, you may already have your desktops

3:27all or partly in the cloud.

3:29Now, you can't really honestly

3:30put all of your desktops in the cloud

3:32because it's kind of an in the name, desktops.

3:35It's something that somebody can work on at their desk.

3:38But there are desktop solutions actually in the cloud.

3:41So for example, imagine you have a small nonprofit

3:45and you've got a couple dozen users.

3:48They're all working on computers that were donated

3:50and they have, I don't know, two gigs of RAM

3:52and an older processor, smaller hard drives,

3:56all that kind of stuff.

3:57And maybe they don't meet the standard

3:59for being able to install something like Windows 11

4:02or maybe even Windows 10.

4:04Maybe they're even 32-bit machines, 32-bit processors.

4:08Maybe they have CRT monitors.

4:10Yeah, I'm not sure how much of a gift this was

4:13as a donation from somebody.

4:14But anyway, this does happen.

4:15Well, how are they gonna get access to modern applications,

4:19modern operating systems like Windows?

4:21Well, they're not on that basis.

4:24You can't install Windows 11 on something like that,

4:26but you can put your desktops in the cloud.

4:29So you can have, hopefully I can write this out

4:32on this drawing pad, Windows 365.

4:36I don't have my normal pen and everything here,

4:38so I'm kind of having a hard time writing.

4:39But anyway, Windows 365 allows you to connect

4:44to a modern Windows 11 machine,

4:47regardless almost of what desktop operating system

4:50you're running.

4:50You can connect from a Mac, from Linux,

4:52from anything really that has a browser

4:54and or that uses RDP.

4:57So as long as you use the remote desktop protocol

4:59or really more accurately, the Microsoft app,

5:02it used to be called the remote desktop app,

5:04I think, something like that.

5:05Now they call it the Microsoft app.

5:07Yet another thing that Microsoft has decided to rename

5:10and confuse everybody.

5:11Anyway, yeah, you could now actually connect

5:15to a modern desktop from a really old, crusty computer.

5:18Or the other part of that is,

5:20maybe you have users working at home.

5:22Well, you don't wanna manage everybody's personal computer

5:25and you really shouldn't.

5:26However, with Windows 365,

5:29you can just have everybody connect from their home PC,

5:33whatever their operating system is,

5:35to their Windows 365 desktop.

5:38It works out really great.

5:39Okay, applications, okay?

5:41There's another thing that is becoming less and less

5:44installed on a local basis.

5:46A lot of these applications now are in the cloud.

5:50So Salesforce, I think you can install locally still,

5:54I think, I haven't really kept up with it.

5:56But a lot of that's done in the cloud now.

5:58It's a web app, okay?

6:00So all you have to do is to open up a browser,

6:02go to a specific website,

6:04and the whole software runs right from there.

6:07Similarly, I used to have a couple of businesses.

6:10I used to run QuickBooks.

6:11I used to, in the old days,

6:12install QuickBooks on my desktop computer.

6:15When an update came out, I had to update it.

6:17Now, with QuickBooks, you just open up their website

6:21and it's always up to date because they update it.

6:23And when you connect to it over a browser,

6:25well, there you go, you've got it.

6:26Also, our network equipment, okay?

6:29So we have to manage that.

6:30Maybe you have someone who's a CCNA

6:32or in a large organization, you might have CCIE,

6:35which is the highest level of network you can get

6:37in network equipment, or for Cisco, excuse me.

6:41So that's something that you're gonna be managing

6:43from on-premises as well.

6:44Now, I do wanna point out, when you move to the cloud,

6:48does that mean you don't have any of this stuff?

6:50No.

6:51Wow, that was ugly.

6:52Let's try that again.

6:53I was gonna skip it.

6:54Anyway, you'll still have some or all of these

6:57to varying degrees,

6:59but you might be able to transition to the cloud.

7:01So a lot of your workload moves to the cloud

7:05and you don't have to manage it locally.

7:06The other part of this,

7:07especially as you get into a little bit

7:08of larger organization is,

7:09well, you might have a server room,

7:11a dedicated server room,

7:13or more likely in a bigger enterprise,

7:16you'll have a data center of your own.

7:17Well, all of these things, when we run them locally,

7:21they get to be a maintenance burden and expensive.

7:25So some people look at Azure

7:27and all of its associated products

7:29that are underneath that Azure umbrella,

7:31and it just looks pretty expensive

7:32when they start to add things up.

7:34Well, you gotta compare that

7:35to what you're already paying for.

7:36You're already paying for powering all these servers,

7:39this whole data center, insurance, maintenance, upkeep.

7:43You also have to pay for new equipment

7:45when something breaks

7:47or when something needs to be updated.

7:50A lot of servers will go about five to seven years

7:54before their end of life life cycle is up.

7:57And the same is true of desktops.

7:58Servers might be able to go a little bit longer,

8:00but desktops, at least in terms of the hardware,

8:01usually about five to seven years

8:03before you cycle them out.

8:04But on-premises, as administrators,

8:07we're really proud of our data center.

8:09We're really proud of our rack of servers over here,

8:11and we can put our hands on it.

8:13We know what every little blinking light here means,

8:15and it gives us a little bit of, I don't know,

8:17kind of a warm, fuzzy feeling that we can lay eyes on it

8:21and know where everything is and stuff like that.

8:23The cloud is much more nebulous that way.

8:26You will know, in general terms, where all your stuff is,

8:30okay, where your tenant is,

8:32but you're not likely to know exactly which server it's on

8:35or even which data center,

8:36because Microsoft's data centers are broken up

8:40into various regions,

8:42and then they're broken up further into availability zones

8:46and other stuff, which we can talk about that later.

8:48But I'll give you an example.

8:49Here in Phoenix, okay,

8:51or actually when I'm at home in Phoenix,

8:52because I'm not there right now,

8:54but in Phoenix, okay, we have,

8:56I think it's West 2 or West,

8:59I think it's West 3 in Phoenix.

9:01U.S. West 3, I'll just put it that way.

9:04Anyway, what does that actually mean

9:05in terms of data centers?

9:06Well, there's more than one data center.

9:07There's kind of Microsoft's main one.

9:09It's about, I don't know, 20 or 30 miles from my house,

9:12but they also have access to and connection to

9:16a couple of other data centers.

9:18So when I drop my tenant into U.S. West 3,

9:22I don't know if it's gonna be in their main data center

9:25or in one of the other parts of the data,

9:27parts of U.S. West 3,

9:29because there's availability zones there

9:32where, you know, if my content is here,

9:34you know, that's my,

9:35let's just say that's a server or something.

9:37If that fails, well, that's kind of okay

9:39because there's a read-only copy replicated

9:42to these other areas of the availability zones.

9:45So if this one goes down, we can use this one instead.

9:48By the way, that's not automatic.

9:50You have to configure that.

9:51Wish it was automatic, but it's not.

9:52Anyway, that's kind of the idea there.

9:54Thus, in the next video,

9:56we'll go ahead and kind of expand upon that idea

9:59and also look at moving from local resources

10:03into the cloud, either partially or possibly even entirely.

0:00All right, so let's take a look at a progression here.

0:03So maybe you have a smaller company

0:04that started to grow and grow and grow,

0:06and now you're in a larger office building.

0:09Like, let's say that this is your corner office right here.

0:12Okay, somebody's corner office.

0:13And when they actually want to work with data,

0:16maybe they're working on their laptop computer here,

0:19the little keyboard down here.

0:20They're working on their laptop

0:22and they're saving files, right?

0:24They're saving files.

0:24Then generally the users tend to think of those files

0:27being stored on their laptop.

0:28And they might be,

0:30but very often they're actually stored

0:32in a network location.

0:34So it might be a mapped drive

0:35that you've created for that user,

0:37or you're redirecting their documents

0:38if you're doing everything.

0:39And we're thinking about all on-prem here,

0:41by the way, on-premises.

0:43So anyway, that actually gets stored somewhere,

0:45doesn't it?

0:45Well, in many organizations,

0:47if you have, again, you know,

0:47like a big office building like that,

0:49it looks like it is.

0:50If they have their own data center,

0:52very often that's going to be on the ground floor.

0:54Okay, there's a lot of reasons for that.

0:56Part of it is because it's easier to route utilities

1:00for the high energy demands that a data center needs.

1:03Plumbing, if there's water cooling solutions,

1:07that's easier to access.

1:08It's easier to wheel data in or to ship data in and out.

1:13There's usually a loading dock somewhere down there as well.

1:15So a lot of that server equipment is very heavy.

1:18And a lot of the uninterruptible power supplies,

1:21or UPSs, are the size of a Volkswagen.

1:24And they're just very big and heavy.

1:26And so that's another reason why,

1:28because usually a ground floor

1:29can support more weight like that.

1:31Okay, so anyway, because again,

1:33a lot of them weigh more than a car.

1:34So anyway, yeah, now we're storing stuff.

1:36It's all down here in our data center on-premises.

1:40Now, as time goes by,

1:41maybe we've expanded out into branch offices.

1:44So maybe we have Phoenix here.

1:45I'm actually getting the hang of

1:47working with this drawing pad

1:48I've been working with lately.

1:49And then maybe down here,

1:50we've expanded to a different office.

1:52Okay, so maybe we have a branch office here in Albuquerque.

1:55We say branch office, but it's still a sizable office.

1:57We have another one over here, let's say, in Denver.

2:00And if you're not from the US,

2:01Phoenix is in Arizona.

2:03Albuquerque is very difficult to spell,

2:04which makes it easy to put the airport code up there,

2:07which is ABQ.

2:08That's in New Mexico, next to Phoenix, next to Arizona.

2:11And then Denver is over here in Colorado.

2:14Okay, so anyway, now what do we have going on?

2:16Well, now we have to have some kind of a link, right?

2:18So maybe this is our link between these offices.

2:21I'll just draw this one in differently here.

2:22So we've got some kind of network link there.

2:24And, you know, in the old days,

2:26we used to have dedicated links.

2:28I'm not saying those don't exist anymore,

2:29but they're very expensive.

2:30So very often nowadays,

2:32these organizations will just use internet, okay?

2:35And the initial feeling there,

2:38the knee-jerk reaction is,

2:39oh, that's not secure.

2:41Well, it can be made secure,

2:42because you can do something like a site-to-site VPN

2:45or other kinds of solutions

2:47that will encrypt and protect that network traffic.

2:51So anyway, that's very often how that is gonna be.

2:54And very often, data will be synchronized from Phoenix

2:59to one or both of these other branch offices.

3:02And one reason for that

3:03is because we also want some redundancy.

3:05What if here in Phoenix,

3:07it's 115 degrees outside,

3:09and the air conditioning totally blows out in this building,

3:12and we have, you know,

3:12these flames coming out of our servers

3:15and everything down here.

3:16So now, that's messed up,

3:18and we can't rely on that data center right now.

3:20And of course, I'm just making up a situation,

3:22but there's all kinds of things that can happen.

3:23We don't really have many natural disasters,

3:25but I guess something could happen.

3:26So what we can do is we can kind of flip the switch

3:29and start to access our data in Albuquerque.

3:31Now, of course, there's a lot of underlying

3:34pre-planned measures to make that happen,

3:36and, you know, things like clusters and failover

3:39and all that kind of stuff.

3:40But anyway, regardless, we have that capability now.

3:43We have a layer of safety in being able to depend upon

3:47these replicated locations.

3:49Now, it's not all just replication.

3:50It could be a lot of other things as well,

3:52but the point is we have now data there,

3:55and we also have data over here in Denver as well.

3:58So the organization continues to grow.

4:01So we can't expand.

4:02Let me kind of back some of this out.

4:04We can no longer expand our data center.

4:06So down here in Phoenix,

4:08we filled up our data center on that ground floor.

4:11That's one reason why maybe we had to open up

4:13a branch office, not just for the data center,

4:15but for a business expansion.

4:16Same with Denver.

4:17Now, these offices also are continuing to grow

4:20and need to support our users and our customers

4:23and whatever else we have in our business.

4:24Well, if we cannot expand those anymore,

4:26then what do we do?

4:27Well, we can move into co-location facilities, okay?

4:31What's a co-location facility?

4:33You might be doing that for all of our offices here.

4:35A colo is another data center.

4:37That's all it really is.

4:38It's just, and in Phoenix, where I live,

4:41we've had a proliferation of them.

4:43There must have been, I can count four or five,

4:46five different data centers that have been built

4:48in the last two years, and they're gigantic.

4:51But what's the advantage of using a data center

4:54from a third party as opposed to having your own?

4:56First of all, who wants to pay

4:58to build your own data center,

5:01a freestanding data center in a separate building

5:03like data centers usually are?

5:05Well, not me.

5:07Those are millions of dollars in expense

5:08and exorbitantly expensive for most organizations.

5:13So what do we do?

5:14We lease some space there, okay?

5:16So we're gonna lease a little bit of space

5:18in one or all of these data centers.

5:20And then we'll take our server racks,

5:22like we saw in our last video here.

5:24And to give you a little bit of sense of scale,

5:26this guy's probably about the right height

5:27for a data center.

5:28I think these are usually 73 inches high,

5:30somewhere around there, 42 inches from front to back,

5:33and the width is usually 24 inches.

5:35If I'm off by an inch or two,

5:36I think that's generally right though.

5:37So that gives you an idea of the size of these server racks.

5:42So now in these data centers,

5:43very often what you could do is you can just wheel in

5:46or ship to or wheel in your own rack,

5:49like I just showed you on the previous slide there.

5:51You can take that rack

5:52and drop it into this data center somewhere.

5:54Drop it into, it sounds like you airdrop it.

5:56You don't wanna do that,

5:58but usually there'll be a loading dock,

5:59you can put it in there.

6:00And IT staff from your company can go into that data center

6:05and there's gonna be badged access and security

6:07and all kinds of things, of course,

6:09because you need to protect your clients

6:11if you own that data center, right?

6:12So this is now called co-location

6:14or sometimes we just call it colo.

6:16So we have a rack in that data center that we're leasing,

6:20we're leasing that space

6:22and we're leasing the utilities that supply it indirectly,

6:25you know, the electricity, the air conditioning,

6:28the physical security that's involved there and everything.

6:31So we're taking advantage

6:32of that whole co-location facilities resources

6:36and we're just renting out one,

6:38enough space to put our rack in, okay?

6:40Usually your own staff will be able to go in and out of there

6:43as they please, and they can only touch

6:46or manage their own rack of servers.

6:49They're carefully monitored

6:51and no one should be able to touch anything else there, okay?

6:54And then here's a representation of a data center.

6:56You can see the racks are in here and everything.

6:58They're, you know, really nice,

6:59pretty lighting and everything like that.

7:01That's the kind of thing you might see in a data center.

7:03Under here, underneath this are usually raceways

7:05that you can route cables

7:07and potentially other utilities and stuff like that.

7:09Some of them have them up in the ceiling instead,

7:10but anyway, that gives you an idea

7:12for what those might look like

7:14when they're actually installed and in place.

7:16Here's another one here.

7:17This looks like a lot of hard drives in this one,

7:20if I'm looking at that right.

7:21And that again is something else you'll have there

7:23is there a lot of storage in these racks sometime,

7:26terabytes and terabytes of storage.

7:28And then this is my favorite data center here.

7:31I don't actually know where this is.

7:32It is an actual photograph.

7:34It's not an AI thing or something like that,

7:36but you see again here,

7:37there's a, it looks like network equipment.

7:39I think that's network equipment up there.

7:41It's hard to tell with the reflection on the glass.

7:42Servers back here,

7:43it looks like there's a lot of storage down here

7:45at the bottom of this one as well.

7:46Anyway, that's the kind of thing you might have

7:48in one of these data centers.

7:49So what did we do here?

7:50Well, we started in one location, right?

7:53We started right there, right here.

7:55Let me get a better color that's more visible there.

7:57Anyway, we started right there and our company grew

7:59and we moved into a data center

8:01and we created a data center and we had branch offices.

8:04They had data centers

8:05and then everything kind of got to be too big

8:08for all of that.

8:09And so then we had to start using co-location services

8:12and it's not all because of growth.

8:13Sometimes it's just a good idea

8:15for things like redundancy and other reasons.

8:17But anyway, what have we actually done here?

8:19By the time we get here especially,

8:22we've kind of built our own cloud, right?

8:24So you have already been in the cloud

8:27if you've been in a situation like this.

8:29You don't control this co-location center, okay?

8:32You're just leasing space down there.

8:34That's what happens when you're in the cloud.

8:37You're leasing, if you will,

8:39resources in our case, Microsoft's cloud.

8:42And anyway, I set that all up

8:43just as kind of a overall guidance on moving into the cloud

8:48and kind of hopefully opening up a little bit more

8:50of a comfortable feeling about doing that

8:51because in certain ways,

8:54many of us have already been doing the cloud,

8:56maybe without realizing it.

0:00All right, now I'm going to refer you to this website.

0:02I've also linked it down below,

0:04so you can kind of explore around on this on your own.

0:07This is actually really cool.

0:08This is something that Microsoft makes available to us,

0:11so you can kind of get a comprehensive look

0:13at what's going on with their cloud, right?

0:16So this will show things such as actual data centers,

0:21power generation, they're trying to get to a more,

0:25what do you call it, carbon neutral energy footprint.

0:28Right now, they're at about 70%.

0:30And you can see, actually, if you look at the legend,

0:32there's a legend here,

0:33this shows sustainability projects, okay?

0:36So with wind, solar, and mixed, okay?

0:39So in my area, if I zoom in a little bit,

0:42I think you can lose these little zoomy things.

0:45This is my area right down here where I live in Phoenix.

0:48It's West US 3.

0:50That's about 20, probably 20 or 30 miles from my own house.

0:54If you click on it, it actually shows it to you over here.

0:56That's the skyline for where I live.

0:58Looks like it was taken from Papago Peak, maybe,

1:01or maybe Camelback Mountain.

1:02Anyway, doesn't matter.

1:04Gives you a little bit of information

1:05about that particular location.

1:08Now, one thing I want to point out

1:09is that when you first set up your tenant,

1:12if it's not already set up,

1:13you have to tell Microsoft where you want it to be located.

1:17This is not something that is very easily moved.

1:20So yes, you'll have redundancies

1:22in other locations if you want,

1:24but your initial choice

1:26has to be a pretty solid decision here.

1:29I would not want to set it up in West US 3

1:32and then tomorrow decide to send it in Central US

1:35or East US or something like that.

1:37So these were set up in terms of geography,

1:40which you can kind of think of geography

1:41as the overall main continent here, okay?

1:45So United States is one of the geographies.

1:47There's also Europe, okay?

1:49That's a geography.

1:50What else have we got?

1:51Asia, I guess Asia's over here, okay?

1:52So Asia's a geography.

1:54Getting back to the US, which I'm the most familiar with,

1:57you'll see that they have, I was talking about energy,

1:59they have sun streams here.

2:01What is that?

2:02I don't know, solar, I guess, okay?

2:03And that kind of gives you a visual representation

2:05of that sort of thing.

2:07There's also wind farms like right here.

2:09Okay, so anyway,

2:09that's how they're supporting that sort of thing.

2:11Also notice that there is these interconnected

2:14undersea cables that go worldwide.

2:18This is huge.

2:19I just saw a YouTube video on

2:21not just Microsoft undersea cables,

2:23but from a lot of organizations.

2:25It's quite a fascinating thing to look at here.

2:28Someone was saying in the video that trillions of dollars

2:32transit these cables every, I think he said every hour.

2:36I guess that's in relation to transactions, banking,

2:38all that kind of stuff,

2:39and overall value of the websites that are connected.

2:42They also used to have, they changed this whole thing here,

2:45but they used to show satellites orbiting the earth here.

2:49Because I guess Microsoft also has satellite connections

2:54that they can use.

2:55Maybe they're trying to hide the fact

2:56that they have a mothership up there somewhere,

2:58then they took out those satellites.

3:00Anyway, this gives you an idea

3:02of how interconnected Microsoft is.

3:04Look, there's only a few places in the world

3:07where they don't have a presence.

3:08There's not that much presence here in Africa.

3:10Okay, I guess they got a couple of points of presence

3:14here and there,

3:15and then there's their main one in South Africa.

3:17Pretty much nothing in all of Russia.

3:19Big surprise there.

3:20They do have some in China though.

3:22So anyway, you get the idea there on what's going on.

3:24So these again are broken down into several categories.

3:28First of all, there's the geography again,

3:30pretty much a continent or a country in general,

3:33and then it's broken down into a smaller area.

3:35Like within the US, there's East US,

3:38there's South Central US.

3:40What's this one?

3:41West Central US.

3:43This was the first, no, that's not the first one.

3:45This was the first one.

3:47West US over here in the Los Angeles area,

3:49if I'm not mistaken.

3:50And one thing that's important

3:51is when you choose the location,

3:53you have to know what it supports.

3:55So if you chose West US, for example,

3:58you go down here,

3:59notice that there are no availability zones here.

4:02I'll talk to you about that again in a moment,

4:04but that's a way that you can kind of fail over

4:07if there is a problem that occurs.

4:09Also, not all data centers, not all, excuse me,

4:12not all regions will support all industry compliances.

4:16Now here, we've got quite a few.

4:17Okay, there's all of these different ones,

4:19but there's also some missing.

4:21So there's no GDPR, which is a European standard.

4:25You might still have to support GDPR

4:27even if you're in the United States,

4:29as long as you do business in the EU.

4:31So you have to look out for that sort of thing.

4:33What are the kinds of compliances that they fall under?

4:36Anyway, if we get off of that one

4:38and go to another one like the one in Phoenix,

4:40you'll see here that we do have availability zones

4:44with three total availability zones.

4:46So let's talk about what an availability zone is.

4:49An availability zone is,

4:51let's take a look at Phoenix here that I'm already on.

4:54There's kind of the main data center.

4:56I don't know if Microsoft would call it that,

4:57but we'll call it that for the time being,

4:59like a main data center.

5:01And then there are other physical data centers,

5:04usually within just a few miles of the first one.

5:06So I think one of the data centers they have

5:08is in the downtown area.

5:10And then sometimes other data centers

5:12will be separated by just a few miles.

5:15One of the data centers I saw, I can't remember where it was,

5:17it looked like it was just maybe three or four miles away

5:21from the first data center.

5:22And that again, is sort of something where to go wrong

5:25with our first location for our data or resources,

5:29then we could fail over to another location,

5:32another part of the availability zone.

5:33And that's for high availability, of course.

5:35Okay, now the next thing I'll point out

5:37just real quick here,

5:38Microsoft has already concluded the project

5:40I'm about to show you.

5:42So it's not current right now,

5:43but it could spark up again in the future.

5:46And that would be this, Project Natic,

5:49I think is how they pronounced it, N-A-T-I-C-K.

5:51They had a data center.

5:53Actually, let me refresh the page.

5:54I think it shows it coming up out of the water

5:56or something like that.

5:58I guess not.

5:58Anyway, oh yeah, there it is.

6:00They have a data center,

6:02it's about the size of a small submarine, I guess,

6:04underwater off the coast of Scotland.

6:06And what they're doing there is they're taking advantage

6:09of the cold seawater on the ocean floor

6:12to cool that data center.

6:14I don't know how they circulated the water

6:16and made it cool and everything,

6:17but they figured out a way.

6:18Obviously, it's watertight,

6:20and it doesn't have any oxygen in there.

6:23So as you might've guessed, also, it's unmanned.

6:26There's no people in there.

6:28And they actually pumped out all the oxygen,

6:31filled it up full of nitrogen,

6:32because oxygen can contribute to things like corrosion

6:35and stuff like that.

6:37And the human element also contributes to certain failures.

6:42So people bumping into things,

6:43accidentally disconnecting things, stuff like that.

6:46Like I said, the project's concluded now,

6:47but it was on the ocean floor for two years

6:50before they brought it back up.

6:51Oh, I think that's the manager guy right there,

6:53if I recognize that guy correctly.

6:55Yeah, there's him there, I think.

6:57Anyway, really cool project.

6:59It had a big power line that went right to it.

7:01This is how they dropped it into the ocean.

7:02And this is what it looks like

7:04when you roll out the data center out of the shell.

7:08Okay, so this is called the payload,

7:10where all the servers are.

7:11And this is called the shell, the actual housing.

7:13What I found was kind of funny was,

7:15you would think there would be some kind of motorized,

7:17automated way for them to roll it in and out.

7:19No, what they use is they use these big hand cranks

7:22with come-alongs, and they just had to take a big lever

7:25and just, you know, on a chain,

7:27and just pull the whole thing into the shell.

7:30But yeah, there's all the servers and everything.

7:32You can see the, looks like cooling.

7:33That's probably where the cooling is right there.

7:35I don't know for sure, I'm just guessing.

7:36Yeah, because those look like radiated fins,

7:39like from an air conditioner or a heat sink.

7:41So they might've pumped the water in through there.

7:42But anyway, regardless, there it is.

7:44And look, it must've been a great success

7:46because look how happy this guy is.

7:48Here's another article on it.

7:50That's not a Microsoft employee, by the way,

7:52unless it's one of those guys that just stands around

7:54and watches other people work.

7:56Guess here they're blasting all the barnacles off of it.

7:58And there's the quaint little Scottish town

8:01right up here in the hills.

8:02Fun fact, I was actually born in Scotland.

8:04Anyway, oh yeah, I like this picture right here.

8:08It kind of reminds me of the amount of closet space

8:10my wife gives me.

8:11By the way, if any of you were OCD,

8:13do you see anything here that might bother you?

8:15Yeah, sure bothered me, look at this.

8:17That sticker was crooked like that for two years

8:20on the bottom of the ocean floor.

8:22They should've sent divers down there to fix that,

8:25but they didn't, cheapskates.

8:27Anyway, of course I'm being facetious, or am I?

8:31Anyway, enough of that.

8:32In the next video, I'm gonna just take you on a little tour

8:35of Microsoft Data Center.

8:36And it's also something you can do yourself,

8:38and I'll put the links for all that down below.

8:40Actually, it links right from here.

8:42We'll go right here next.

8:43We're gonna go to take a tour in the Microsoft Data Center.

0:00All right, let's get back to our discussion of data centers.

0:04So, by the way, I don't know why the earth is all gray and carbon looking here.

0:08It must have been scorched earth or something like that.

0:12The other thing I want to point out, though,

0:12was I forgot to mention this in the previous video.

0:15Microsoft says that the failure rate for the servers

0:19that were in that undersea data center

0:20were only one-eighth as bad as something

0:24that would be on a land-based data center.

0:26Usually, Microsoft offers five nines, which is 99.99,

0:30actually four nines, 99.99% uptime.

0:35It's not a guarantee that they'll be up that much,

0:36but if they fail and it exceeds that failure rate,

0:41then they will somehow compensate you.

0:43I don't know.

0:44So let's go ahead and take a tour.

0:45Okay, so we're going to look at the Microsoft Data Center.

0:48And I click right there and you can do the same as well.

0:50Links should be down below if you want to follow along for yourself.

0:53And here we go.

0:56So there's actually a couple of websites

0:57that Microsoft has that makes this available.

1:00I'm not sure if there's really much difference between any of it.

1:02And somehow if I move my mouse pointer around,

1:04there's a little light that follows it also.

1:06Maybe we're under spotlights for surveillance or something.

1:09But it shows a checkpoint.

1:12As you can imagine, when you drive up,

1:14you have to get past the security guard at the front gate, right?

1:18We'll talk about that later on, I think,

1:20in another video further down in this course.

1:22So physical security is critical.

1:24There's a perimeter fence.

1:25I don't know if Microsoft has them,

1:26but some data centers also have armed guards.

1:30Also, in the global data centers

1:32that I showed you in the globe that was previously there,

1:35not all the data centers appear there, by the way.

1:37There are some government ones that don't appear on that map

1:40and that are deliberately obscured.

1:43I think one of them in Arizona is in Camp Verde.

1:45I'm probably not supposed to know that, but anyway.

1:47They also do a lot of recycling there.

1:50In fact, I just learned this this past week.

1:52I knew they disposed of their hard drives.

1:54When the hard drive fails, they have to dispose of it somehow.

1:56And I knew that there were machines that they used

1:58to kind of grind them up, but I didn't realize how much.

2:01Apparently, they're essentially ground up to virtually powder

2:05when they have a failed hard drive.

2:08And then that's recycled somehow.

2:09I don't know how they do that, but anyway.

2:10Here's their carbon usage goal right here.

2:13You know, sustainable, renewable energy and the like.

2:17Now let's go ahead and get into the lobby.

2:20So first thing I want to point out,

2:22when it comes to entering the lobby,

2:24it looks like you can use an AI assistant here as well.

2:26That's new.

2:27That wasn't there last time I was here.

2:28Anyway, you can see there's this very friendly person

2:30behind the glass, ready to greet you.

2:33Now, I did learn some other things this past week

2:36about this whole process,

2:37because I talked to one of the people

2:40that's toured a Microsoft data center.

2:42I think he toured the one in Dublin.

2:44He's Irish.

2:46And in other news,

2:47he also said that they had to put a hard stop

2:50on further expansion of data center

2:53in the Dublin area in Ireland,

2:55because they're consuming all the electricity in that area

2:58and rolling brownouts are becoming a thing there.

3:01So I guess they better get

3:02onto that sustainability energy a little faster.

3:05But in order to even get in here,

3:07you have to sign three contracts.

3:08You have to pass a background check.

3:10There are multiple doorways for two-factor authentication.

3:14So that's actually,

3:15they're talking about the man trap over here

3:17is what he was talking about.

3:18You have to have a physical key,

3:19which requires a work ticket of some kind.

3:21And when you go in and when you exit,

3:24by the way, none of that information is in this tour

3:26that I'm showing you right here.

3:28When you enter, you are weighed.

3:30Yeah, they'll take your weight.

3:32So you might wanna skip breakfast on that date.

3:34And then they also weigh you on the way out.

3:36You can probably understand why.

3:38They want to know if you brought something in

3:41and you're suddenly lighter when you come back out

3:43so that you might've deposited something in there

3:45that you shouldn't have.

3:46And they wanna make sure

3:47that you're not walking out with something

3:49that you shouldn't have.

3:50Some, I don't know, hard drive or whatever.

3:52So yeah, pretty stringent security there, folks.

3:55But these man traps here,

3:57which are also known as security vestibules.

4:00I guess man trap sounds a little bit too much

4:01like some kind of nightclub or something like that.

4:03Anyway, these security vestibules,

4:07if you know how those work, there are two doors.

4:10First of all, you have to pass some kind of security measure

4:12to get into the first door.

4:13A lot of times it's to buy,

4:14I don't know how it is at Microsoft,

4:15but a lot of times it's a biometric,

4:18like a fingerprint or an iris scan, something like that.

4:21They used to do cornea, not corneas, retinal scans.

4:24But as people age,

4:26the retina actually does change a little bit.

4:28So they've now gone to iris scans in a lot of locations

4:31and you might have to have a pin.

4:32So there's two factors of authentication that go on there.

4:36Most data centers,

4:36you also have to be visually observed by a guard.

4:40Like, I don't know if she's a guard or not.

4:41I don't know if that's her role there,

4:42but that's similar to what could happen there.

4:45Then once you're inside of there,

4:46you may have to pass another security measure

4:49before the second door opens.

4:51And if you fail,

4:52then they will trap you in there until security comes, okay?

4:54What else we got here?

4:56Looks like a nice little break room over there, okay?

4:58We don't want to explore that.

4:59But anyway, we'll go into the operations room.

5:02I did learn, and you can look at that if you want to,

5:04but I did learn that most of these data centers

5:07only have about 14 employees that run the data center.

5:10Of course, there's other people that do things like maintenance

5:13and, I don't know, cleaning or groundskeeper.

5:15There's the security guard and all that stuff.

5:17But I mean, the actual data center doing IT stuff,

5:19there's usually only about 14 people that run that whole thing.

5:22Anyway, you can see how everything's measured here.

5:24They do have lots of sensors.

5:25I'll talk to you about that later on in the course.

5:29But they have a staggering amount of sensors

5:31that determine things like temperature

5:34and failures of various types

5:35and electrical consumption and that kind of thing.

5:38Anyway, there's little dots you can click on throughout here.

5:40I'm not going to exhaust all of those.

5:41AI is, of course, becoming a big thing worldwide.

5:44There's also a video you can play here

5:46where someone will talk to you about what goes on here.

5:48But anyway, let's go into the mechanical area.

5:50I'm not going to really fully explore this.

5:52This is all just things like your chillers or coolers,

5:55your power, all that sort of thing.

5:58Okay, so these are the coolers over here, I think.

6:00Cooling, right.

6:01And then this is the power over here on the right.

6:03But we're going to enter the server room.

6:04We're going to get right there.

6:05That's where all the good stuff is.

6:07Now, one thing I'll point out real quick here

6:09about Microsoft's server room

6:12is that it is just almost famously boring, okay.

6:17Compare this server room.

6:19And by the way, this looks better

6:20than the previous version I saw.

6:21But it's not very colorful,

6:23not a lot of decorative LEDs and stuff like that.

6:26Compare that to the Google data centers.

6:29And look how happy these Google employees are.

6:30They must like working there.

6:33That's not showing what I thought it was going to show.

6:36Okay, here we go.

6:37Look how colorful their data centers are.

6:40Wow, wouldn't you rather work at Google than at Microsoft?

6:42Look at these.

6:43Oh my gosh, these are beautiful.

6:44But there's actually a good reason

6:46for them being boring as well.

6:48Microsoft wants to commit all their resources

6:50to actual productivity.

6:51One of the people I heard talk about this last week

6:53said that they can stand these data centers up

6:57in an amazingly fast period of time.

6:59And of course, there's got to be permits

7:01and all that stuff.

7:01All the red tape is different

7:02than what I'm talking about here.

7:03But the actual shovel, shovel in the dirt

7:07to standing up the data center can take place,

7:09I think they said in eight months.

7:11And they don't do a lot of fancy stuff here.

7:13In fact, a lot of the bolts that connect

7:16a lot of the external steel structure,

7:18they don't even trim off the bolts.

7:20They just leave everything that way, okay?

7:22But what I want to get to here

7:23is to show you some of the server blades.

7:25So Microsoft designs their own server blades.

7:29This is just a bunch of disk blades.

7:31That's what JBOD is,

7:32just a bunch of disks in there for mass storage.

7:36They have typically used a lot of hard disk drives

7:39in the past, especially for things like cold storage

7:42or storage that doesn't have to be readily available

7:45quite as fast, okay?

7:46For hot data, they'll usually put that on SSDs.

7:49That's transitioning.

7:50Why?

7:51Well, a couple of reasons.

7:52Number one, hard disk drives are traditionally larger

7:54in size than SSDs.

7:56So that's one reason why they were favored there,

7:59just a higher density of data.

8:00But SSDs are catching up.

8:02You're starting to get more density out of SSDs

8:05than we've had in the past.

8:07But the overriding factor there really is power consumption.

8:10A hard disk drive with spinning platters

8:12uses a lot more energy than an SSD.

8:15Even though SSDs are more expensive,

8:18that gap is also shrinking.

8:19Anyway, that's a JBOD blade.

8:21That's what that one looks like.

8:22And then this would be one of their compute blades,

8:24which has the processor and RAM and all that stuff on it,

8:28and the motherboard.

8:29Microsoft does not buy these off the shelf

8:32from Dell or Lenovo or whoever, or HP.

8:35They actually design their own systems,

8:38and then they outsource them

8:40to have one of those companies make them for them.

8:42And they're unique and proprietary just to Microsoft.

8:46I don't know how my scrolling got all weird, but anyway.

8:49You can explore that a little bit further on your own as well.

8:51This one's a new one, Azure Maya.

8:54It's funny, I read that as Azure Mafia when I first saw it.

8:58For all I know, the Gambino family's controlling

9:00this whole data center.

9:02I'm going to go here into the circular center,

9:04and this is where a lot of the backend stuff

9:06takes place here as well.

9:08I don't really see any here.

9:09Probably it's in a different area.

9:11But they also have in the telecommunications area,

9:15or the network room, there it is.

9:16Let's just go in there.

9:16Yeah, here it is.

9:19Notice how boring this looks.

9:20Again, there are a lot sexier data centers in the world

9:23than what Microsoft has, but they get the job done.

9:27This is plywood on the wall.

9:28It's even a special kind of plywood.

9:30I wonder if this says anything about it.

9:31Oh yeah, this plywood is treated with special coating

9:34that does not release particulates

9:36for controlling dust.

9:38Wow, I guess they didn't get that at Home Depot.

9:40Anyway, I'll leave the rest to you.

9:42There's a lot of different little buttons

9:43and little dots here that you can click on

9:46to get some interesting information.

9:48But if you're new to the cloud,

9:50new to Microsoft data centers,

9:51this might get you a long ways into understanding

9:54what it's capable of.

0:00All right, so let's summarize some of the things we looked at in terms of Microsoft's data center

0:04with really a discussion of Azure. So, Azure is an umbrella term. It's Microsoft's total cloud

0:12that they use for organizations. So, this will include a lot of different sub-products, if you

0:18will. So, if you just have Azure, you don't really have much. It's like having a toolbox with no

0:23tools in it, okay? You have to put tools inside. One of those would be something like Entra ID,

0:28which is probably the most foundational part of this. It used to be called Azure Active Directory.

0:34Then they changed it to Entra ID. I think there was actually another name before all of this as

0:39well. But anyway, now it's called Entra ID. That's where your identity is for things like your user

0:44accounts and groups and certain other things. But primarily, it's for identity, as the name kind of

0:50implies there. There's also Intune, which is another significant part of Azure. This is the

0:57mechanism that you can use, the cloud-based mechanism, to manage your devices. So, things

1:03that we used to do on-premises in Active Directory, such as work with group policy objects.

1:09The group policy objects can largely be replaced by what Intune can do. It can do most, if not,

1:16well, I don't want to say all of it, most of what group policy objects used to be able to do.

1:20And it can also replace a lot of what we did in System Center, which is also known as System Center

1:26Configuration Manager, or Configuration Manager, or ConfigMan, or CM. That's gone through another

1:32bunch of changes in terms of the terminology or names that we all refer to it as. But anyway, CM,

1:38Config Manager, is all on-premises. Of course, Intune would be in the cloud. And there are many

1:44other products, Defender, XDR, Purview, Sentinel. Those are just a few that come to mind right off

1:51hand. But gosh, there's a ton of products underneath the Azure cloud. Now, we looked at the

1:56data centers in our previous nugget here, previous video. There are over 400 of those data centers,

2:02and they're still growing. They're still building them. And 70 different regions. This does not

2:07really touch directly on what we do, other than the fact that we use AI. However, Microsoft is huge

2:13in the AI data center capacity now. Anytime you use Copilot, that's part of their AI. That's their

2:20engine. They have dedicated two gigawatts for AI data center capacity. So how much is two gigawatts?

2:29That is enough flip-the-switch power. In other words, how much available power there is

2:34at any given moment. It's enough to power one and a half million homes, or a medium-sized city.

2:42That's how much that is. It's an enormous energy requirement for that. Anyway, I just threw

2:49that in there. As I mentioned before, they're looking at 70% renewable energy and improving that.

2:54There's 165,000 plus miles of fiber optic or subsea optic cable to transmit data. And I think I

3:05heard this past week that it's terabits worth of bandwidth that they have there. There's about

3:12a billion users supported in Azure, with millions of organizations involved. In other words, millions

3:19of customers, if you will. Microsoft invests about a billion dollars annually in

3:25cybersecurity and infrastructure resilience. And I expect that really to kind of grow as well.

3:30And remember we talked about some compliance earlier, like GDPR, HIPAA is another one,

3:36Sabine's Oxley, some other stuff like that. All of those regulatory government requirements,

3:40there's about 90 compliance certs that Microsoft possesses across their data centers.

3:47And so that is Microsoft Azure kind of in a nutshell,

3:51but there's a lot more to that, which we'll explore as we continue on.

0:01And finally, let's take a look at a good justification

0:05for using something like Microsoft's Cloud.

0:07And again, you know, really, it doesn't have to be only Microsoft's Cloud

0:10because there's a lot of other clouds out there for different purposes.

0:13Amazon Web Services or AWS.

0:16VMware has a cloud, although it doesn't serve the same purpose.

0:20Google, that's another one that is possibly in some ways

0:23a competitor to Microsoft's Cloud,

0:25although I would have to say that on scale

0:28and when you look at feature per feature,

0:31probably Microsoft is definitely the leader there.

0:33And that's not a bias of any kind.

0:35That's just really the way it is.

0:37But let's take a look at how things work.

0:38So let's say that you have a business

0:40and your business is in sports memorabilia

0:43and you sell those little sports figure bobbleheads.

0:48Have you seen the bobbleheads?

0:49They have a lot for baseball,

0:50but I think they have them for football as well.

0:52These players and they're on a little body.

0:55There's a big head on a little body.

0:56It kind of goes like this.

0:58It bounces back and forth like this on a spring, just like that.

1:02Okay, that was a pretty good imitation, I thought.

1:04Anyway, so maybe that's your business

1:06and this is how it looks most of the year.

1:10So these are the dollar sales that you make

1:13and these are the months of the year.

1:15Now you'll see why I'm going to do this in a moment,

1:17but we're going to start our fiscal year in April.

1:20That'll just make it easier.

1:22So we have April, May, June, July,

1:25August, September, October, so forth

1:27until we get to Super Bowl season.

1:30So in Super Bowl season,

1:32we kind of would expect our sales to really get up there.

1:36So we'd have February and March right here, okay?

1:39So most of the year,

1:40our sales are just kind of, eh, they're okay.

1:43They're not that great, but they're okay.

1:45And then when it comes to Super Bowl season,

1:47and especially when you have a winner for the Super Bowl,

1:50the sales go, wing, like this.

1:52Now everybody wants whatever the bobblehead is

1:55for the star quarterback or whoever in football.

2:00And yes, I'm talking about American football,

2:02also known as the real football.

2:05That other thing is actually just soccer.

2:07All right, I've lost half my audience right now, haven't I?

2:11But you get the point.

2:13So we have demand that is not consistent all year round.

2:17A lot of businesses are like this.

2:19Another thing you can think of there is Christmas season.

2:23Okay, the holiday season,

2:24where again in usually December or maybe November, Black Friday,

2:29those sales shoot through the roof.

2:31And then after Christmas and after all the returns come in,

2:34in January, everything goes back down again, right?

2:37So let's say that in our company,

2:40we hit this time of year last year and our servers crashed.

2:45They could not handle the load

2:47and we lost a lot of business.

2:49It was a professional embarrassment.

2:52Everyone went to a competitor.

2:54And so I took our, I'm pretending I'm the person here.

2:58I took our CEO and our CFO and our CIO and all the C-suite.

3:04I took them to an expensive lunch at Arby's

3:07and I sat down and I drew out on the little paper mat

3:11on our trays there how much money we lost

3:15and the value of buying a really beefy server

3:19to handle all of this, okay?

3:20Now, yes, there's a lot of things

3:22that fall through in the analogy, okay?

3:24In a real life situation,

3:25we're not going to have a server,

3:27a single server to handle all this,

3:29but we're going to pretend as if we do, right?

3:30So I was able to finally convince them.

3:32They said, all right, fine.

3:34Have it your way, James.

3:35You can buy an expensive server.

3:37So what I do is I go to Dell and I look up a rack server.

3:42I say, oh, this server will do it pretty well.

3:44It starts at only $12,000.

3:46Well, I was kind of fiddling around with this earlier

3:49and I'll be honest, I just started throwing money at it.

3:52I just started check boxing things that looked expensive

3:55just to kind of make a point here, okay?

3:57So anyway, I added a bunch of stuff on there,

3:59more processors, more memory, all kinds of stuff.

4:02And so I'm not even done yet.

4:04And it racked up $33,906, $34,000 essentially.

4:09And like I said, I just started picking expensive stuff.

4:12This is why they don't let me manage the servers

4:14at CBT Nuggets.

4:16I get carried away, folks.

4:17Anyway, so we got a $33,000 to $34,000 investment now.

4:23And this year, when Super Bowl season came around again,

4:26we didn't have a crash because we were able to meet the demand

4:30using my fancy new expensive server, okay?

4:32The executives were pleased and everything.

4:34However, when it came time for our semi-annual report,

4:37what would that be, in June or July?

4:40Right here, the executives wanted to know,

4:43how much were we using that fancy server we bought you?

4:46Oh, well, you know, we're really only using 15%

4:51of its total capacity here from April through July.

4:56It's only been 15%.

4:5715%? You mean you spent $34,000 on a server

5:02and we're only using 15% of it?

5:04Well, yeah, but it's because I didn't want it to crash again

5:08in February.

5:09Well, they might not like that,

5:12that this is largely wasted server resource utilization,

5:16this whole area right here, most of the time.

5:19Now, any reasonable executive would understand

5:22how that scales and the importance of that,

5:24but not all executives are reasonable, are they?

5:27And I can't just go to Dell and say,

5:29hey, you know what?

5:30That fancy server you sold me last year,

5:32turns out we only used it 15% capacity most of the year.

5:36So can you give us back the 85% that we didn't really use?

5:40Nope, they're not going to do that, are they?

5:41Same as if you buy a steak at a restaurant

5:44and you only eat half of it,

5:45they don't give you 50% of your purchase back.

5:47Believe me, I've tried.

5:48Now, this is really where something like Azure can be useful.

5:53Because in Azure, what you can do

5:54is you can build virtual machines in the cloud.

5:57So now, again, this is our sales,

6:00and these are the months over here,

6:02and I'm not going to draw in all the months,

6:03but you get the idea.

6:04So we're like this most of the year,

6:07and then in February and March, whoop, way up there.

6:11What we can do in Azure with the virtual machines we build there

6:15is we can do something called scaling up

6:17or scaling out, either way.

6:18Scaling up means that we just add more resources.

6:22So let's say that this virtual machine

6:24that we're using in Azure has, I don't know,

6:26four gigs of RAM, one CPU, something like that.

6:32Well, we can set it up, and this can be automated, by the way,

6:35so that it triggers within, oh, maybe a couple minutes even.

6:38When our sales start to climb,

6:40then it can automatically add two CPUs, four CPUs, whatever.

6:45It can add eight gigabytes of RAM, 16 gigs of RAM.

6:48However much we need, it can scale it up within our parameters.

6:52And then when we're done, when March has come and gone

6:55and we've sold out of bobbleheads, it goes back down.

6:59Then it just goes right back to what we had in the first place.

7:03And we don't pay for the excess server resources

7:07that we're not using.

7:08That's a big factor when it comes to Azure resources.

7:12And that's scaling up.

7:13By the way, just since I already mentioned it,

7:15scaling out would mean that we just take that server,

7:18this first original server here, and we just add another one.

7:22So we have another server now that's four gigabytes and one CPU.

7:26I'm running out of room.

7:27But anyway, you get the idea.

7:28You can add, scale out to two servers, scale out to three servers,

7:31however many you need.

7:32It's all kind of dependent upon your goals and everything.

7:34Anyway, that's another good reason to be able to use Azure resources

7:39for things like that.

7:40And that's just kind of a short list.

7:42There's a lot more involved than just those reasons.

7:45And, in fact, I'll have to say,

7:47those of you that are accustomed to on-premises Active Directory,

7:51Microsoft will probably still support it for a long time.

7:53I'll mention this again later in the course as well.

7:55But their plan right now is they really don't want people being on Active Directory.

8:01I mean, it's been around since 2000.

8:02It's already been around 25 years.

8:04It does have some security exploits that really have never been fully resolved.

8:11And Microsoft is strongly encouraging everyone to move their identity,

8:14especially, into the cloud.