My initial thoughts after reading documentation on Azure ARC. Part of my continuing education, research, and testing of Azure Arc in preview.
Azure ARC introduced during Microsoft Ignite is another milestone in Microsoft’s expansion of services in servicing Hybrid environments.
Microsoft is capitalizing on the fact that most enterprises will have a hybrid scenario. Most companies already have some existing on-premise resources and infrastructure. Investments that have been made in data centers. A limitation with maintaining compliance and keeping a central control with on-premise data.
Azure arc is a step in centralizing the management, governance of on-prem and other cloud service provider resources unifying policies and structure brought in by Azure.
With System Center, Configuration Manager (SCCM) and Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), the management of cloud resources could have been managed on-premise as an extension of the on-premise data center. With Azure arc, on-premise and other cloud service resources become an extension of the governance, management, and policies available extensively in the cloud, truly unifying all resource management through Azure.
First, the consistency, structure management, and features brought in by Azure were able to be brought in to on-premise data centers with Azure stack.
Azure DevOps and Pipeline services allowed for integrating other cloud providers in the development process.
Building on the full range of existing Azure services, Azure Sentinel natively incorporates proven foundations, like Log Analytics, and Logic Apps. Azure Sentinel enriches your investigation and detection with AI, and provides Microsoft’s threat intelligence stream and enables you to bring your own threat intelligence to other cloud services and on-premise resources.
Azure ARC extends these services into three new key areas.
- Management and security.
- Azure Data Services
- Expanding Azure Stack offerings with Azure Stack Edge.
Management and security
- Windows Servers
- Linux Server
- Kubernetes Cluster
- On-premise or in any Cloud provider
Azure Data Services
If I understand correctly, simply put Azure Arc allows you to run Azure data services anywhere and monitor these services and configure them through azure where ever they may be.
This allows for unified management, unified security from a single point via Azure.
Currently, the following services are available to run on-prem , or in other cloud services.
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale
are now available on Azure Arc for private preview. Its worth noting Azure data services on Azure Arc requires you to have a Kubernetes cluster as the orchestrating fabric in your environment to run Azure data services on the hardware of your choice. The how-to on how this works and how it is enabled still alludes me and i hope to demo or do a proof of concept in the hows.
