Announcing the Public Preview of the Azure Arc gateway!

The wait is over, we are thrilled to introduce the Public Preview of the Azure Arc gateway for Arc-enabled Servers, and Arc-enabled Kubernetes! They reduce the number of required endpoints for customers to configure their Enterprise proxy when setting up for using Azure Arc services.

How Does it Work? 

Arc gateway introduces two new components:

Arc gateway – An Azure Resource with a single, unique endpoint that will handle the incoming traffic to Azure from on-prem Arc workloads. This endpoint is to be configured in customer’s enterprise proxies.

Azure Arc Proxy – A component of the Arc connected machine agent that routes all Agent and extension traffic to its destination in Azure via an Arc gateway Resource. The Arc Proxy is installed on every Arc-enabled Resource within the core Arc agent. 

Arc gateway on Arc-enabled Servers Architecture

Arc gateway on Arc-enabled Kubernetes Architecture

How do I Deploy Arc gateway?

At a high level, there are three steps:

1. create an Arc gateway Resource.
2. Get the Arc gateway URL, and configure your Enterprise proxy
3. Either onboard your Servers/K8s clusters using the gateway resource info or update the existing Arc Server/K8s resource with the created gateway resource info.

For Arc enabled Servers, you can find Arc gateway details & instructions in the Public Preview documentation, and the Arc gateway for Arc-enabled Servers Jumpstart Episode. For Arc-enabled Kubernetes, more details are available in the Public Preview Documentation.

Arc gateway Endpoint Coverage, Illustrated by the Azure Monitoring Scenario

For the Arc gateway public preview, we have focused on covering primarily Service Endpoints for Azure control plane traffic. Most of the data plane endpoints are not yet covered by Arc gateway. I’d like to use the Azure monitoring on Arc-enabled Servers scenario to illustrate the Endpoints covered by the Public Preview release.

Below is a comparison of the list of endpoints customers must open access to in their enterprise proxy with and without Arc gateway for this common scenario. As displayed, Arc gateway cuts the list of required endpoints nearly in half and removes the need for customers to allow wildcard endpoints in their on-prem environment.

We're continuing to expand the endpoint coverage and further reduce the number of endpoints required to be configured through customers' Enterprise proxies.

I’d like to invite you to try out the Arc gateway Public Preview release and share any questions, comments or feedback and requests to the Public Preview Contact Form.