Announcing General Availability of Azure Local on Microsoft Azure Government Cloud

We are excited to announce that Azure Local is now generally available for Azure Government customers. Building on the momentum from our public preview, Azure Local is ready for production deployments, enabling government organizations to run cloud-connected infrastructure at their own physical locations under their operational control and helps them align compliance with stringent regulatory and security requirements.

What is Azure Local?

Azure Local brings the familiar Azure experience to your on-premises infrastructure allowing agencies to deploy, manage, and scale infrastructure locally while more easily integrating with the broader Azure ecosystem. With Azure Local, government customers benefit from unified management, robust security, and operational flexibility, whether running virtual machines, containers, or mission-critical applications.

Key Features

• Streamlined Deployment & Management: Azure Local enables agencies to deploy, configure, and manage infrastructure directly from the Azure portal or using infrastructure-as-code tools like ARM templates. This approach helps simplify provisioning, allows for consistency across environments, and reduces operational overhead. IT teams can quickly set up clusters, define networking and storage, and automate updates, making day-to-day management predictable and efficient.
• Unified Observability: With native integration to Azure Monitor and Azure Arc, Azure Local provides comprehensive visibility across all distributed resources. Agencies can monitor virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and physical infrastructure from a single dashboard, leveraging over 60 built-in metrics, insights dashboards, and customizable alert rules. This unified view helps teams proactively manage performance, troubleshoot issues, and maintain compliance across both local and cloud environments.
• Non-Disruptive Updates: Azure Local helps support easier update management through Azure Update Manager. Administrators can schedule and apply updates to one or multiple instances with just a few clicks. The platform orchestrates workload migration and rolling updates across physical nodes, helping mission-critical applications remain available and uninterrupted, even during maintenance windows.
• Flexible Workload Support: Agencies can run a wide range of workloads on Azure Local, from general-purpose Azure Local Virtual Machines to containerized applications using Arc enabled Azure Kubernetes Services. The platform helps offer flexible sizing, networking, and storage options to meet diverse requirements. Customers can bring their own VM images for specialized needs or select from a curated set of images in the Azure Marketplace, enabling rapid deployment of both legacy and modern workloads.

• Security by Default: Azure Local is built with a hardened security posture, leveraging Microsoft’s best practices for infrastructure protection. Integration with Microsoft Defender for Cloud helps provide more unified security management, continuous threat detection, and automated remediation across all resources. Agencies can benefit from advanced security controls, including network isolation, identity management, and compliance monitoring.

• Extended Security Updates (ESU): For agencies running legacy Microsoft products, Azure Local helps offer access to Extended Security Updates, enabling continued protection with fundamental patches beyond end-of-support dates. This capability helps organizations maintain compliance and security for older workloads while planning for modernization.
• Trusted Launch: Azure Local supports Trusted Launch for virtual machines, providing enhanced protection against rootkits and bootkits. VMs are equipped with virtual TPM (vTPM), enabling Secure Boot and features like BitLocker encryption. The vTPM state is preserved during live migration and automatic failover, enabling data integrity and security throughout the VM lifecycle.

Getting Started

Visit the https://portal.azure.us/ to download the latest Azure Local OS image and create your instance. Customize your deployment to meet your agency’s requirements for cluster configuration, networking, and storage. To learn more, visit https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-local/

Why Azure Local for Government?

Azure Local helps deliver the scalability, reliability, and compliance government agencies desire while maintaining operational control and data residency. Agencies can confidently modernize infrastructure, support mission-critical workloads, and meet evolving regulatory standards.

Conclusion

The general availability of Azure Local in Azure Government marks a major milestone in empowering agencies with secure, scalable, and efficient distributed cloud infrastructure. We invite government customers to deploy Azure Local today and unlock new possibilities for modernization and operational excellence.

Stay tuned for ongoing enhancements as we continue to innovate and expand Azure Local’s capabilities to support your mission.