At our Microsoft Ignite conference this week, we’re sharing new ways to continue to enhance your cloud adoption journey. First, we are excited to announce the preview of Azure Chaos Studio—a fully managed experimentation service to help you track, measure, and mitigate faults with controlled chaos engineering, systemically improving the resilience of your cloud applications. Second, we continue to build a better, easier, and more comprehensive approach to guide your cloud environment preparation, with Azure landing zone—an environment for hosting your workloads, pre-provisioned through code—without losing sight of the application to be deployed. And third, to maximize your organization's investment in the cloud, we have fresh guidance on cloud economics to build your cloud business case with key financial and technical guidance from Azure.

1. Azure Chaos Studio: Track, measure, and mitigate faults in your applications 

Are you confident in knowing how your mission-critical Azure apps will respond to different failure scenarios? Today we’re announcing the preview of Azure Chaos Studio, which enables customers to model and deliberately introduce faults that simulate real-world outages and validate how your application performs under those scenarios. These are the same tools used by Microsoft engineers to build the resilience of cloud services. Chaos Studio enables customers to build on your terms, seeing how apps will respond to real-world disruptions. Gain chaos engineering insights and accelerate the discovery of hard-to-find issues, from late-stage development through to production, all within Azure.

With Azure Chaos Studio you can:

• Spend more time learning about application resiliency, without managing tools and scripts.
• Get started quickly with agent-based faults that disrupt within resources, and service-based faults that disrupt resources at the control plane.
• Validate product quality wherever and whenever you want with CI/CD pipeline integration, using both to monitor production quality through continuous validation.

We continue to work on building a comprehensive and continuously expanding library of fault types (including resource pressure faults for CPU, memory, and disk, network faults to add latency or block access to resources, and faults for service-specific disruptions like Cosmos DB failover, VM Shutdown, and Redis restart) for you and your team to understand how your application would perform in such scenarios and to help you implement a cohesive strategy to make informed decisions to make your application more reliable. 

2. Azure landing zone: Eyes on the target end-state

As you approach every new cloud project, preparing your environment for cloud application is critical for your success. Whether you are creating a brand-new application or modernizing an existing one, adopting cloud technologies is a journey—where you're traveling towards a target end-state. Azure landing zone conceptual architecture is the master architectural plan, based on Microsoft best practices and reference implementations described in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. Its scaled-out controls enable you to innovate safely, in alignment with the cloud operating model that works best for your organization, and progress through different stages, arriving at your destination at your own pace.

If the target Azure landing zone conceptual architecture fits within the operating model and resource structure you're already planning to use, we can help you deploy it with a ready-made deployment experience. To help you successfully prepare your cloud environments for any projects, including migration to the cloud, modernization of existing apps, or building cloud-native apps on Azure, with proper scaled-out governance and security in the cloud, quickly, we have developed Azure landing zone accelerators. These are Azure-portal-based templates that allow you to deploy a pre-configured environment implementation with key components in place, such as management groups and policies providing a full implementation of the conceptual architecture based on standards and best practices. Simply point and click through the template by answering a few environment architecture questions to customize it to your needs, in your Azure Portal experience, and to deploy your environment automatically and quickly.

3. Cloud economics: Make your cloud investment count

“More than 70 percent of the customers have cost optimization as their top cloud initiative.”¹ Through research and many customer interactions, we have made available new cost management approaches to guide your business strategy and goals definition. Our updated approach is here to help you understand the cloud economics of your investments and now includes financial tools and templates to build your business case and optimize your cloud investment.

We have also created a Power BI template, backed by an Excel model, that can help you forecast your costs early on as you’re planning your cloud journey. Use the Power BI template and on-premises compute unit list to understand how you can take advantage of Azure offers and benefits like Azure Hybrid Benefit and reserved instances to save against pay-as-you-go pricing and optimize your costs.

Check this new video guidance and learn about some lesser-known tips for estimating and managing your cloud spend. From the Azure Cost Management Portal to Power BI for custom views and reporting, to API-based integration that feeds cost data into your existing financial systems, we'll help you to keep track of your cloud spend and optimize your investment in the cloud.

What’s next?

As you continue to adopt Azure services, we will continue to evolve and improve our technical and business content and tools to guide your digital transformation journey and help you realize the business impact and goals you have set up for your organization.

1. Control the chaos! Come and break things with Azure Chaos Studio. Analyze your dependencies and risks and invent your own chaos scenario hypotheses. Experiment with injecting different fault types to see how your apps respond. Learn from your results and mitigate any issues using the reliability guidance of the Azure Well-Architected Framework. Then try different failure types or target different applications.
2. Try out the Azure landing zone accelerator. Part of the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure, this Azure-portal-based deployment provides a full implementation of the conceptual architecture, along with configurations for key components such as management groups and policies.
3. Estimate your cost using the right offers and benefits. Use these tools, including a cost estimator, to help you forecast your costs, find ways to save against pay-as-you-go pricing, and optimize your costs. Check out this video to learn how to use the cost estimator.

Additionally, Azure Migration and Modernization program (AMMP) has helped thousands of customers in accelerating their cloud migration and modernization journey. Based on customer requests, AMMP is expanding its support to additional scenarios including SAP, hybrid with Azure Arc, security, and application modernization. Learn more about the latest enhancements to AMMP support today.

Discover additional cloud enablement tools, programs, and resources for a clear path forward for your entire organization to successfully achieve ongoing value from the cloud.

¹Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report

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