By Guest Author Ricardo Fiel, Senior Cloud Solution Architect, Cloud Native and DevOps @ Microsoft
Faster time to market and increased pace of innovation with higher reliability, easier governance and security. As companies look into technical platforms to support their digital transformation journey, cloud native is a trend that can't be ignored.
Cloud native applications are optimized for cloud scale and performance, based on microservice architectures, use managed services and take advantage of continuous deployment to achieve these goals. Containers and Kubernetes, Platform as a Service and Serverless are technology platforms most commonly found in public, hyperscale clouds, and provide the benefits listed above for digital transformation. As an example, it's no surprise that Kubernetes adoption is increasing exponentially, across all industries and company sizes.
But just as more and more workloads are moving into the public cloud, some, due to regulatory issues or data sovereignty, need to remain on-premise. In this scenario, where does cloud native live and how can companies benefit from the same managed services that a public cloud like Microsoft Azure offers?
Azure Arc - Innovation Anywhere
Azure Arc is a recent Microsoft Azure product that brings the Azure control plane to any datacenter or public cloud. This means companies can use the proven security, role-based access control, monitoring, governance and other Azure services, wherever their workloads are deployed.
There's 4 flavors to Azure Arc:
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Arc enabled Servers: virtual or physical, Linux or Windows servers.
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Arc enabled SQL Server.
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Arc for Kubernetes: any Kubernetes cluster, including OpenShift, can now be centrally managed. Also, with GitOps, companies can now define their cluster definitions and application deployments in a single place.
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Arc for Data Services: bring Azure managed data services (SQL Managed Instance and PostgreSQL Hyperscale) to any infrastructure, and benefit from high availablity and a service managed by Microsoft in your own datacenter.
Why should you care?
As the number and complexity of workloads deployed by companies tends to increase, and span multiple infrastructures and types of applications, the need for a solution to centrally manage and govern these workloads is critical. By using Azure Arc, you can extend Azure management and managed services to any infrastructure, and benefit from the same Azure public cloud services:
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Organize resources in Azure, even if those resources are running elsewhere
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Manage and govern resources with powerful scripting tools
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Enforce organization standards and policies at scale using Azure Policy
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Modernize on-premises and multicloud operations
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Adopt cloud practices on-premises
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Run managed Azure data services anywhere
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Bring Azure Security anywhere
This rich set of functionality can now be taken anywhere your workloads are running and provide you with a common platform to achieve digital transformation, at scale, with the fast time to market and increased pace of innovation that cloud native serivces offer.
Get inspired by customer and partner stories
Since the release of Azure Arc, many customers and partners have implemented solutions that go from datacenter management at scale to simplifying deployments to edge locations.
Get inspired at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-arc/#customer-stories
Where can you start?
Have a look at our product page for Azure Arc:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-arc/
Deploy an end-to-end example using the Jumpstart repo: https://github.com/microsoft/azure_arc
