This article is a follow-up to a series where I provide a concise, pragmatic overview of the steps involved in deploying the required infrastructure for installing your first SAP system in the cloud. This post outlines the steps required for getting a demo Azure account.
While this post offers a simplified perspective, it’s crucial to emphasize the significance of comprehensive analysis, expert guidance, and customer involvement in cloud migration projects. Insights shared are drawn from my experience at q.beyond ibérica, a Microsoft Azure partner. However, it’s essential to acknowledge that there may be other approaches better suited to your unique needs.
Let’s get started! OK, so we decided that we wanted to find out for ourselves how complex it is to move our workloads to a cloud such as Microsoft Azure.
As well as familiarising ourselves with the cloud, we also want to start reaping all the benefits that cloud providers are touting on their websites, and honestly who does not want to improve their bottom line by saving on infrastructure investment. No more need for a 24/7 team to maintain your servers/network, power, cooling… Provision new servers in minutes. Get world-class security and performance for your applications… and so on?
Cloud is the way
Fine, but where do we start?
- First things first, get an Azure subscription. You can do this online; it takes less than 5 minutes and you may be eligible for a $200 credit good for 30 days. You can find the sign-up URL by clicking https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/
- You may also want to enter a credit card so that your resources are not blocked when the initial credit is used up.
- It is also a good idea to set up a budget to alert you when you are approaching your spending limit.
Finally, enable MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) if you have not already done so, and create a “break-glass” admin account to ensure that your organisation is not locked out even if you are unavailable because you are on holiday 🙂
Once all steps have been completed, you should have a fully working Azure environment that you can access through https://portal.azure.com.
In the next post of this series, Day 1. Planning. What is a Landing Zone? Define goals. Define target architecture, we will look at our (future) SAP deployment from 10.000 feet in order to understand all the elements and guiding principles that we should consider before actually starting to provision resources in Azure.
