Introduction

I'm Lyle Dodge and I'm a Senior Program Manager in Microsoft IT. I work in the centralized hosting team which manages our on premise and public cloud environments for internal IT customers. This means tens of thousands of servers (virtual and some physical), database servers and other infrastructure across multiple physical datacenters and the public Azure cloud. Our organization is undergoing rapid transformation from classical operations management to managing / hosting subscriptions for our customers who are using DevOps to deploy much faster than before. This creates opportunities for centralized automation across thousands of Azure subscriptions to reduce costs and increase the acceleration of capabilities. On this blog, I’ll cover a bunch of things that our hosting team does in the enterprise. I’ll take questions from the comments, from our teams, and from sessions I do at the Executive Briefing Center in Redmond on the Microsoft IT + Azure topic.

How Microsoft IT is Organized

First off – let’s talk about how we’re organized in IT. Microsoft IT is organized as a group of business process units (BPUs) that focus on specific functions. Some things are centralized, some not. For example, we’re migrating to a single Visual Studio Online instance across all IT to enable a lot of scenarios. DevOps is being achieved across the org, however teams are going at different paces of adoption.

One of the BPUs is our org, Enterprise Infrastructure Services (EIS), led by Brad Bell. His organization covers internal support for the company, networking for IT and campus buildings globally, and our infrastructure organization, Service Deployment & Operations (SDO) led by Rick Stover.

SDO doesn’t manage the Azure platform, or Office 365 or Lync – the product groups manage those. The best way to think of us for this series is your internal IT hosting team in a large enterprise. We help make sure the environments are secure, up to date on patches, help customers migrate from older to newer server systems upon release, beta test stuff that hasn’t been released, and help provide feedback to the product groups on things an enterprise needs in future product versions.

Next up…

Put your questions in the comments, or you can contact me directly at lyle.dodge@microsoft.com.  I may not get back to you right away, but I’ll be collecting questions and posting answers to this blog. I’m expecting this to be a very active blog – it’s amazing the rate at which the Azure and System Center teams are releasing features.

Next topic – what are we thinking about subscription management, resource groups, role based access control, and what the announcements at AzureCon have changed on some of our thinking.