GS-7: Keynote: Industry Insights - Microsoft Azure: Arpan Shah and Thomas Di Giacomo

Good morning, Dr. G. Great to see you as well. And as you can tell, we're over Teams right now. It's a very unusual time indeed. And what's on my mind right now—and I know it's on the mind of our engineers and our partners and everyone listening to us—is what can we do together to actually respond in this unique environment and build for success. So I'm really enthusiastic about all the things we've done in the past year and all the things we're about to do. It's really exciting to meet everyone here virtually and talk more about this.

So you know, we released the largest Mv2 instances, partnering with SUSE on SAP, and they're the largest Mv2s in the public cloud. And we're finding that customers are really benefiting from this because SAP HANA demand is growing, and of course data is growing as they do more in the cloud. And along with product innovation, we've also seen some really great Azure-SAP joint customer wins. One example is a major European insurance carrier—one of the largest in Europe, with over 10 million people to care for, and we care deeply about their life and non-life products and services. Today they run this on Azure with SUSE, and without Azure and SUSE's variable scale, they wouldn't be able to meet demand. For example, they can scale their fraud management application within minutes—they can jump and scale to two-terabyte machines at peak times. And if you think about what would happen on premises, it would take them days or weeks or months to do that. So this is possible because of the partnership with SUSE and Microsoft. And again, beyond the innovation, it's just great to see our customers benefiting from what the cloud can do to help their business.

Yeah, when I think about what Microsoft and SUSE can do together, we can enable what works for customers that was never possible before, and do it in a way that's really optimized for price and performance. So on our team, we've actually designed our instance families to have the best capabilities and price-performance for our customers. And working with your team, we've landed SUSE-certified HPC certification. To date, I think we have about 20 or 30 HPC workloads that are already certified on SUSE, so customers don't have to worry—they can get up and running very quickly and run their data-intensive workloads. I think the other thing from an innovation perspective that's really unique is that SUSE and Microsoft have collaborated to deliver the first enterprise Linux kernel optimized for Azure, with DMA and high-speed storage built in. This is really critical for HPC because it provides a 25% throughput increase and a 23% latency decrease. Both of these factors are critical for HPC workloads requiring a smaller footprint for servers. So customers get all this benefit with less cost.

Right, Dr. T, yeah sure. So we are aiming to release the new SUSE Linux for HPC, which could also be tuned for Azure. And you're right, the Azure-optimized kernel and HPC platforms are really good examples of how we can uniquely bring joint solutions to solve customer problems.

That's right, Dr. G. SQL Server 2019 is supported on the latest versions, and we work together to ensure the best performance and higher throughput while reducing memory consumption, which is really critical for applications running on SQL Server 2019. And we also support Kubernetes deployments. So working with SUSE, SQL Server now works with the CAASP platform. Customers who want to build cloud-native applications on Kubernetes can do that on CAASP and SQL Server 2019. And with Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL, customers can save up to 75%, which is really critical because customers cannot always move directly to the cloud. But if they have a hybrid benefit, they can move at their own pace and onward very quickly.

When I think about Microsoft and through the culture, customers are essential—and that's truly true in this uncertain time like you said, Dr. G. Over the last few years, we've done a lot of work to help our customers. One great example is how we provide unique co-located support—there's one ticketing system that puts SUSE and Microsoft together, so the customer just has to call one person to get their issues resolved. And the other thing we're doing is recruiting partners, building a joint ecosystem that can help deploy SUSE applications, so these partners are well-versed not only on SUSE but also on Azure. The other recent development I'm really excited about is Microsoft's Azure Migration Program. There we streamline all migration efforts, whether it's Windows Server or Linux, especially when it comes to SUSE. Our team has worked to make sure that SUSE is a core part of our migration program, so customers can work with our migration program and get all this support in a very streamlined way.

Microsoft is really focused on meeting customers where they are. And we truly believe that hybrid—even in the fullness of time—is a very durable state. Customers will have workloads they need to keep on premises for regulations or business compliance or even latency reasons. Whether they have mainframe systems or large databases that can't move, or edge solutions where applications need to be close to data and customers. So a few months ago, we announced Azure Arc, which allows customers to take advantage of our innovation and management no matter where their workloads live—on premises or multi-cloud. And today I'm really excited—Azure Arc now supports SUSE Linux. If you have SUSE Linux applications or virtual machines, you can use the Azure control plane to manage hybrid deployments across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge. Let me show you what that looks like. Here you can see a screenshot of our Azure portal showing virtual machines running on premises alongside those in Azure. In one view, you can manage at scale all your resources—virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters—whether they live on Azure or on premises. You can organize them, tag them, apply policy, security, and governance, all in one experience. With Azure Arc supporting SUSE environments across multiple environments, I think this is going to be great for customers who aren't ready to move all their workloads now.

Yeah, Azure Arc and SUSE Manager are entirely complementary, and that was one of our design points—that what we were building wasn't conflicting or at odds with other management tools. Customers would use Azure Arc to manage at-scale deployments across many different platforms and environments. As you saw in the screenshots, you get one central view to manage all of that in one place. With SUSE Manager, it gives you a control plane to manage applications running in SUSE. IT professionals and developers can use SUSE Manager to manage, patch, and update applications running in each of those environments. So to me, they're very complementary and work really well together.

To me, one of the exciting directions is that SUSE Cloud Application Platform was launched on Azure Marketplace in March, reducing deployment time for SUSE CAP container workloads from four hours to under one hour. The pay-as-you-go version will be available later this fall of 2020. It brings such a simple and efficient solution that prioritizes developing applications. We just talked about how Azure Arc is helping with Kubernetes deployments and virtual machines, and I think with SUSE Cloud Application Platform, our customers can really have that simplicity and confidence to build Kubernetes applications. So really excited about that.

Thanks, likewise. Thank you, Dr. G, for having me. Look forward to collaborating with you and our customers and partners. Thank you.