The Creation Process of the Cloud Economic Assessment

Recently I joined the Cloud Data center and Dev ops team here at Concurrency, and right away I, along with two other interns, were given the project of creating an MVP of a Cloud Economic Assessment (CEA).  This assessment is a virtual tool that will be used to help clients understand how feasible it is to move to Azure, helping them understand the cost and logistics of their applications.  This was a challenging project that required a lot of questioning, feedback, and brainstorming to get to the beginning versions that we have now.

At first, we questioned what we were doing or what we needed to create, so we began to research and learn more about the Azure fundamentals and Azure costing. From there we created a list of questions to better comprehend what a client would be interested in when debating the decision to move to the cloud.

After futher research, we better understood just exactly what we were doing.  We analyzed an Azure migrate dump of data, transposed it, and then imported the data into an Azure SQL database.  For the purpose of the MVP, we used the basic pricing tier and a max storage of 100MB, as this is a testing environment of what will later become a much larger part of a bigger picture.

Learn more about Azure SQL Database pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/sql-database/

I ran into some software problems when trying to import the data.  The version of Office 365 that was installed on my computer was a 64-bit, however, when needing to download Microsoft Access Database Engine 2016  it required a 32-bit version of the software.  After some adjustments and uninstalling and reinstalling Office 365 as the 32-bit version, I was able to import the data into the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio smoothly.

From there we imported the data into Power BI and began to create the dashboards.  Using the various tools that Power BI offers, we created multiple visuals to make the data then readable/usable, so the client can see a holistic view of the feasibility of moving to the cloud. 

This project has offered me a view of multiple core values that Concurrency prides itself on.  The one that shown through the most was the amount of teamwork it took to get this assessment up and running.  From asking various people for help on the matter to working together to get the visuals we wanted, there was no shortage of willingness to help.  I am excited to see what else this project has to offer me and to teach me!