On prem infrastructure to cloud - Career advise

[Guest2]

Similar to many other companies, we have a cloud infrastructure strategy. Microsoft Azure & Intune.

Over the next 2 to 3 years there are plans to shift all services into cloud (or just decommission unneeded sevices when there’s a cloud service to replace it)

For people like me who have been building, managing and maintaining on premise infrastructure for many years, does this spell the end? - no more on prem technicals skills required to manage servers, appliances, VMs and firewalls.

Instead back end tech is all looked after by Microsoft and everyone becomes a glorified button presser in the Azure portal console.

When every service is fully cloud hosted, what next for the teams that manage servers, VM & networks. Even technical architects, what’s there to design if all services are in public cloud?

I have worked with security teams in the past so cybersecurity may ne a good area to move into. That being said, if all services are public cloud in theory they will be updated regulaly and require no team to monitor threats.

I have taken the Azure fundementals course and Azure admin courses and have access to both consoles so have been running testing and carrying out some basic tasks

What’s everyones opinion of cloud services and there career paths?

 

[Quartz]

There will still be need for onsite infrastructure in the security-cleared sector. I also think that there will be local infrastructure for critical services. The critical question being "What if the link to the cloud goes down?" Bear in mind that that is as much a business decision as a technical one, but somewhere like a hospital cannot afford to be dependent upon a data link to who-knows-where.

Me? I'm retired.

 

[Worthy]

I deal with questions like the above every day. Long story short, cloud is the best tech career path to be in at the moment. The market is insane. The idea that it instantly rules out the need for skilled "on-prem" techs to manage it is false.

You need skilled people to design the foundations for your Azure environment. You still need to design and implement systems that run in Azure. Architects and engineers are still required to do all of that and maintain it. You still need skilled people to manage firewalls in Azure, also VMs (to a certain extent, if you're using them) it doesn't all magically happen for you without having to do a thing.

You should avoid the portal when building systems and move over to infrastructure as code. Start looking into terraform (my choice)/arm/bicep/pulimi, depending on your current skillset.

Talking to people about this is my day job, and I could talk about it for days. Let me know if there's anything specific you want to know. Don't be scared of it, or think it will put you out of a job. Get on board.

 

[Guest2]

Thanks both. @Quartz I have seen a roadmap for our company and there are plans to have some small on site IT rooms but no data centre like now.
I imagine any critical services that need to be kept (or cannot be moved to Azure) will stay in these broom cupboards

@Worthy Yes, the Azure administration course did prove to me that its still a big beast to build the foundations and manage the networks, resource groups, storage and everything else in there. It was totally foreign to me, but interesting all the same.

It did sound like it could get expensive and very fast in terms of running VMs with large amounts of storage. Terraform is what our company will be using (apparently)

At the moment I only really have access to Intune, Azure AD and some policies. I don't have access to conditional access, networks, vms or other areas. Would it be worth my looking into the conditional access side of things do you think?

I may drop you a message if thats ok, thanks

 

[Zefan]

What Worthy said. If someone thinks that cloud is going to replace the requirement for traditional skillets completely, they don't understand cloud. Just because MS have binned their on-prem certifications, it doesn't mean no one needs to know about it anymore. Also, it's on-premises, on not on-premise (despite the fact that industry have at times used it in their documentation); personal peeve of mine

If I were you I'd be hitting up the AZ-104 curriculum.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

personal peeve of mine

We all now need to refer on-prem to on-premise.

 

[Quartz]

I imagine any critical services that need to be kept (or cannot be moved to Azure) will stay in these broom cupboards

This is a conversation someone technical should be having with someone more business-oriented.

 

[Throrik]

Just to throw a curve ball here too - in-house Infrastructure also isn't going anywhere for everyone. Where I work we've just pulled a significant chunk out of AWS to save a huge swathe of cash on OPEX spend, it was cheaper to deploy Private "Cloud" Infrastructure for us, and we're a massive eCommerce company. Cloud is fantastic as long as you know what you're doing and what to expect, but it's not for everything still, especially not in bigger companies. I agree with others though, start thinking of infrastructure as Cattle, everything should be done via code/runbooks etc, we heavily utilise vRO/vRA/Ansible/Terraform/Jenkins and even more in the various disparate departments. We've also stopped buying expensive chassis/blades like Cisco UCS and gone with cheap tin because we capacity plan properly and just replace as and when a failure occurs because we have high FT.

It very much depends on the workload too, we're still invested in various Cloud Platforms, AAD, 365 etc is king, but not necessarily everything.

 

[Guest2]

What Worthy said. If someone thinks that cloud is going to replace the requirement for traditional skillets completely, they don't understand cloud. Just because MS have binned their on-prem certifications, it doesn't mean no one needs to know about it anymore. Also, it's on-premises, on not on-premise (despite the fact that industry have at times used it in their documentation); personal peeve of mine

If I were you I'd be hitting up the AZ-104 curriculum.

Good to know my current skillset won’t be completely wasted. I suppose at the end of the day there will be many companies still with on-premises ( ) hardware that are staying that way or migrating to cloud infrastructure.
The AZ-104 was the course I sat around a month ago. Very interesting but some of it went straight over my head.
It felt like trying to compress 10 years of tech knowledge into 4 days

 

[Zefan]

Ah, I am bad for skimming OPs! What courses did you do, as in who ran them and how were they delivered if you ain't mind me asking?

 

[Guest2]

Ah, I am bad for skimming OPs! What courses did you do, as in who ran them and how were they delivered if you ain't mind me asking?

Azure fundementals and Azure admin az-104 courses. Ran by Microsoft, delivered remotely. We had to register a learning account within Azure

 

[Zefan]

Hmm, they're not cheap either! I found the fundamentals one really good, with no real cloud background I did it and the cert exam in a single day. I did happen to do it in person at Microsoft HQ, so perhaps that makes a difference There's also aan absolute shed load of information in the admin course, I imagine they can't have been able to timetable in the appropriate amount of time to do practical lab exercises. I was going to recommend the online self-paced learning path for az-104, but you'll have received that party line enough time from the MS delivered course no doubt

 

[Guest2]

Just to throw a curve ball here too - in-house Infrastructure also isn't going anywhere for everyone. Where I work we've just pulled a significant chunk out of AWS to save a huge swathe of cash on OPEX spend, it was cheaper to deploy Private "Cloud" Infrastructure for us, and we're a massive eCommerce company. Cloud is fantastic as long as you know what you're doing and what to expect, but it's not for everything still, especially not in bigger companies. I agree with others though, start thinking of infrastructure as Cattle, everything should be done via code/runbooks etc, we heavily utilise vRO/vRA/Ansible/Terraform/Jenkins and even more in the various disparate departments. We've also stopped buying expensive chassis/blades like Cisco UCS and gone with cheap tin because we capacity plan properly and just replace as and when a failure occurs because we have high FT.

It very much depends on the workload too, we're still invested in various Cloud Platforms, AAD, 365 etc is king, but not necessarily everything.

I feel like shifting every service in our company to cloud (which seems to be the strategy) is going to bite people in the arse big time. The annual / monthly cost will probably end up costing way more than keeping services on premises.
It will be interesting in 3 years time what pans out. Some of the services in our company require huge amounts of storage - not including mailboxes & shared mailboxes

 

[Guest2]

Hmm, they're not cheap either! I found the fundamentals one really good, with no real cloud background I did it and the cert exam in a single day. I did happen to do it in person at Microsoft HQ, so perhaps that makes a difference There's also aan absolute shed load of information in the admin course, I imagine they can't have been able to timetable in the appropriate amount of time to do practical lab exercises. I was going to recommend the online self-paced learning path for az-104, but you'll have received that party line enough time from the MS delivered course no doubt

The admin course was quite expensive, around £4500 I think for the 4 day course.
Lab exercises we would do a couple then the tutor would leave us to do one or two others in our own time. I did feel a bit like i was completing the exercise steps parrot fashion. At the end of a long day not all that info was going in. Others said the same

 

[Zefan]

Yeah I don't like "just follow the steps, click here, type this" style labs, they don't teach me how to do things properly. I think one really needs a project of sorts, or the way I've been going (although probably not the perfect way) by recreating some on-prem systems/networks in azure. That way I can fiddle around and fix/break things in an azure way, while at least being confident with the other elements.

I think that ultimately unless you're working with it full time, everyone is going to feel like you do now. The best you can do is familiarise yourself as much as possible.

 

[opethdisciple]

snip

 

[opethdisciple]

I deal with questions like the above every day. Long story short, cloud is the best tech career path to be in at the moment. The market is insane. The idea that it instantly rules out the need for skilled "on-prem" techs to manage it is false.

You need skilled people to design the foundations for your Azure environment. You still need to design and implement systems that run in Azure. Architects and engineers are still required to do all of that and maintain it. You still need skilled people to manage firewalls in Azure, also VMs (to a certain extent, if you're using them) it doesn't all magically happen for you without having to do a thing.

You should avoid the portal when building systems and move over to infrastructure as code. Start looking into terraform (my choice)/arm/bicep/pulimi, depending on your current skillset.

Talking to people about this is my day job, and I could talk about it for days. Let me know if there's anything specific you want to know. Don't be scared of it, or think it will put you out of a job. Get on board.

This. You start writing IAC and transform in to DevOps.

 

[Guest2]

This. You start writing IAC and transform in to DevOps.

Infrastructure as code doesnt sound like a new thing. Provisioning services you can use powershell to administer os images and im sure you can do similar in machine creation sevices. Netscalers and probably other load balancers, everything can be built in CLI. A few lines of code and you have VIPs, servers and services created.

Why is IAC any different to coding on appliances and servers? (Other than the code being different i guess)

 

[opethdisciple]

Infrastructure as code doesnt sound like a new thing. Provisioning services you can use powershell to administer os images and im sure you can do similar in machine creation sevices. Netscalers and probably other load balancers, everything can be built in CLI. A few lines of code and you have VIPs, servers and services created.

Why is IAC any different to coding on appliances and servers? (Other than the code being different i guess)

Because it's not ad hoc scripts any more and the servers your using in the cloud are not physically in front of you. They are just virtual concepts in a cloud provider that you code against using your IAC tool of choice. Your infrastructure is defined as code. You can version control it. Use CI/CD pipelines to deploy it etc.. etc...

I get what your saying. I'm not trying to diminish your skill set. But I think it's just that times have moved on and the convenience and elasticity of the cloud is pushing more companies to migrate on prem to cloud services.

The IT industry never stands still. You have to continuously learn and adapt.

Your skill set is still valid. You will just have to add some new ones to the tool belt. IT is about layers of experience on top of layers.

If you're in the Microsoft world and your company are migrating/using Azure your best course of action is get an Azure Certification and learn Terraform (or what ever IAC tool they are using to code in).

 

[Guest2]

Because it's not ad hoc scripts any more and the servers your using in the cloud are not physically in front of you. They are just virtual concepts in a cloud provider that you code against using your IAC tool of choice. Your infrastructure is defined as code. You can version control it. Use CI/CD pipelines to deploy it etc.. etc...

I get what your saying. I'm not trying to diminish your skill set. But I think it's just that times have moved on and the convenience and elasticity of the cloud is pushing more company to migrate on prem to cloud services.

Your skill set is still valid. You will just have to add some new ones to the tool belt.

Interesting, so the servers exist in cloud, managed by the cloud provider but anyone (who pays for them) can choose an IAC tool of choice to manage them?
There must be some underlying tin in very large datacenters, that needs mananging by Microosft / Amazon / Google. Still trying to get my head around the "your infrastructure is defined as code" comment.
Version control - perfect, it's great having version control on things like our gold images. If all infrastructure can be version controlled then yes, very useful indeed.

Our company does have a data centre team who will take over the VMs and storage side of things and a networks team who I presume have build the underlying Azure network for everything. It seems I need to slot into an area that looked after some of the remote services and/or security side of things. Conditional access could be an area of thought