Accelerate Innovation Across Hybrid & Multicloud Environments with Azure Arc

With many organizations across the globe adopting the multicloud and edge computing approach, many applications, data centers and hosting environments are running across heterogeneous infrastructures, where managing, governing, and securing these IT estates has become a challenge. The need for customers is to be able to adopt a solution that centrally allows them to inventory, organize and enforce control policies on their IT resources wherever they are.

Leveraging Azure Arc and our Hybrid approach, SNP helps its customers manage the resources deployed within Azure and their on-premises environment through the same control plane. With Azure Arc, customers can now simplify and easily manage their infrastructure, accelerate migration decisions with a policy driven approach while following regulatory compliance.

• Microsoft is enabling Azure to manage the below services deployed externally:
• Windows and Linux servers running in bare metal, VMs, and public cloud IaaS.
• Kubernetes clusters.
• Data services based on SQL Azure and PostgreSQL Hyperscale.
• Applications packaged and deployed as microservices running on Kubernetes.

Hybrid Unified Management & How it Benefits your Business

Azure Arc involves deploying an agent on servers or on Kubernetes clusters for resources to be projected on the Azure Resource Manager. Once the initial connectivity is done, Arc extends governance controls such as Azure Policy and Azure role based access controls across a hybrid infrastructure. With Azure governance controls, we can have consistency across environments which helps enhance productivity and mitigate risks.

Some key benefits of Azure Arc include:

• Azure Arc enabled solutions can easily expand into a Hybrid-cloud architecture as they are designed to run virtually anywhere.
• Azure Arc data includes technical and descriptive details, along with compliance and security policies.
• Enterprises can use Azure security center to ensure compliance of all resources registered with Azure Arc irrespective of where they are deployed. They can quickly patch the operating systems running in VMs as soon as  vulnerability is found. Policies can be defined once and automatically applied to all the resources across Azure, data center and even VMs running in other cloud platforms.
• All the resources registered with Azure Arc send the logs to the central, cloud based Azure monitor. This is a comprehensive approach in deriving insights for highly distributed and disparate infrastructure environments.
• Leveraging Azure Automation, mundane to advanced maintenance operations services across the public, hybrid or multi-cloud environments can be performed effortlessly.

Azure services for support management and governance of other cloud platforms. includes:

• Azure Active Directory
• Azure Monitor
• Azure Policy
• Azure Log Analytics
• Azure Security Center/Defender
• Azure Sentinel

Unified Kubernetes Management

With AKS and Kubernetes, Azure Arc provides the ability to deploy and configure Kubernetes applications in a consistent manner across all environments, adopting modern DevOps techniques. This offers:

Flexibility

• Container platform of your choice with out-of-the-box support for most Cloud native applications.
• Used across Dev, Test and Production Kubernetes clusters in your environment.

Management

• Inventory, organise and tag Kubernetes clusters.
• Deploy apps and configuration as code using GitOps.
• Monitor and Manage at scale with policy-based deployment.

Governance and security

• Built in Kubernetes Gatekeeper policies.
• Apply consistent security configuration at scale.
• Consistent cluster extensions for Monitor, Policy, Security, and other agents

Role-based access control

• Central IT based at-scale operations.
• Management by workload owner based on access privileges.

Leveraging GitOps

• Azure Arc also lets us organize, view, and configure all clusters in Azure (like Azure Arc enabled servers) uniformly, with GitOps (Zero touch configuration).
• In GitOps, the configurations are declared and stored in a Git-repo and Arc agents running on the cluster continuously monitor this repo for updates or changes and automatically pulls down these changes to the cluster.
• We can use cloud native tools practices and GitOps configuration and app deployment to one or more clusters at scale.

Azure Arc Enabled Data Services

Azure Arc makes it possible to run Azure data services on-premises, at the edge, and 3rd party clouds using Kubernetes on hardware of our choice. 

Arc can bring cloud elasticity on-premises so you can optimize performance of your data workloads with the ability to dynamically scale, without application downtime. By connecting to Azure, one can see all data services running on-premises alongside those running in Azure through a single pane of glass, using familiar tools like Azure Portal, Azure Data Studio and Azure CLI.

Azure Arc enabled data services can run Azure PostgreSQL or SQL managed instance in any supported Kubernetes environment in AWS or GCP, just the way it would run it in an on-prem environment.

With the of Azure Arc, organizations can reach, for hybrid architectures, the following overall business objectives:

• Standardization of operations and procedures
• Organization of resources
• Regulatory Compliance and Security
• Cost Management
• Business Continuity and Disaster Management

For more on how you can revolutionize the management and development of your hybrid environments with Azure Arc, contact SNP Technologies Inc. here.