I had the chance to speak with Ryan Willis (Senior Program Manager at Microsoft) on how to learn best practices and strategies for onboarding a wide range of resources, including Windows, Linux, SQL server, Kubernetes clusters, and Azure services across Hyper-V, VMware, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform assets.
What is Azure Arc-enabled servers?
Azure Arc-enabled servers enables you to manage your Windows and Linux physical servers and virtual machines hosted outside of Azure, on your corporate network, or other cloud provider. This management experience is designed to be consistent with how you manage native Azure virtual machines. When a hybrid machine is connected to Azure, it becomes a connected machine and is treated as a resource in Azure. Each connected machine has a Resource ID enabling the machine to be included in a resource group. Now you can benefit from standard Azure constructs, such as Azure Policy and applying tags. Service providers managing a customer's on-premises infrastructure can manage their hybrid machines, just like they do today with native Azure resources, across multiple customer environments using Azure Lighthouse.
With Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes, you can attach and configure Kubernetes clusters located either inside or outside Azure. When you connect a Kubernetes cluster to Azure Arc, it will:
Appear in the Azure portal with an Azure Resource Manager ID and a managed identity.
Be placed in an Azure subscription and resource group.
Receive tags just like any other Azure resource.
Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes supports the following scenarios:
Connect Kubernetes running outside of Azure for inventory, grouping, and tagging.
Deploy applications and apply configuration using GitOps-based configuration management.
View and monitor your clusters using Azure Monitor for containers.
Enforce threat protection using Azure Defender for Kubernetes.
Apply policy definitions using Azure Policy for Kubernetes.
