What is Azure Arc?
Over the last decade, Microsoft Azure established itself as a leader in the public cloud industry. Microsoft's hybrid cloud story started back in the early days of Azure with Windows Azure Pack and progressed with Azure Stack, Azure Stack HCI, and various other products.
In November 2019, at the Ignite conference in Orlando, FL, Microsoft announced Azure Arc, which is the latest addition to its hybrid cloud capabilities. In simple words, Azure Arc lets customers run Azure services anywhere they want, that is, in their data centers or in other public clouds, and manage them through their existing Azure management capabilities. You can now leverage your favorite Azure management tools and services to host your applications wherever you want, allowing you to utilize your existing hardware investments without adding management complexities and security risks.
As Figure 1.1 illustrates, Azure Arc extends the Azure cloud beyond Microsoft's data centers. You still interact with Azure tools (the portal, CLI, PowerShell, APIs, SDKs, and even third-party deployment tools such as Terraform), but rather than using them to interact with your Azure resources, you also leverage the same tools to interact with your on-premises infrastructure and other cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP):
Figure 1.1 – Azure Arc overview
Azure Arc is an umbrella of the services comprising hybrid cloud offerings across the infrastructure and data services. At the time of writing this book, it includes the following services. It is very likely that this list will continue to expand, and we will see more scenarios being included in Microsoft's hybrid cloud story:
- Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure:
- Azure Arc-enabled servers
- Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes
- Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server
- Azure Arc-enabled services:
- Azure Arc-enabled data services
- Azure Arc-enabled machine learning (in private preview)
Multi-cloud architectures are an important pillar of the IT strategy for organizations of all sizes these days. With containerization and cloud-native deployments, migrating applications from one infrastructure platform to another isn't the tedious and time-consuming job it used to be years back. With Azure Arc, Microsoft is moving toward being the preferred cloud management platform for your multi-cloud architectures. You can now manage Kubernetes clusters running on AWS or GCP through the same tools you'd use to manage Azure Kubernetes Service.
With this, Azure provides a seamless management experience across on-premises data centers, edge environments, and multi-cloud architectures.
What Azure Arc isn't
Azure Arc is neither a private cloud solution nor a replacement of Azure Stack services. Azure Stack continues to grow as a go-to solution for building intelligent hybrid cloud solutions with specialized hardware.
Azure Arc lets you leverage your existing infrastructure investments, which isn't possible with Azure Stack. If you are running hundreds of Windows or Linux servers in a virtualization environment, you can bring Azure Arc in there without disrupting or rebuilding the infrastructure, which isn't the case with other hybrid cloud solutions by Microsoft.
Azure Arc isn't an orchestrator for your on-premises data centers or virtualization infrastructure. You still must manage your hardware infrastructure; however, it can let you manage and govern your infrastructure the same way you'd manage your Azure infrastructure, using the same Azure portal. Now that we know what Azure Arc is, let's see where it can be useful with the help of a few use cases in the upcoming section.