Since launched 18 months ago, the Azure Arc Jumpstart project has grown tremendously. With more than 90 automated scenarios, thousands of visitors a month, and a vivid community, the project has become the de-facto standard when it comes to where people go for learning the goodness that is Azure Arc.
As part of the project, we also developed ArcBox. An opinionated sandbox environment for all things Azure Arc with no need for anything besides your Azure subscription. ArcBox has been adopted and embraced by the community and provides an automated and seamless experience to get things up and running.
Introducing ArcBox Flavors
Providing a painless, fully automated deployment for all-things-Azure-Arc was always the cornerstone of ArcBox. Whether you are an IT professional, a DevOps engineer, or a Data architect, ArcBox has the right Azure Arc implementation for you.
But not everyone needs everything, that’s why we are excited to announce “ArcBox Flavors” - The same automation, but only the right resources for you!
Our first flavor, ArcBox for IT Pros, will be focusing on Azure Arc-enabled servers with the unified management and operations around it, providing you with a comprehensive experience with no hustle, just deploy and have a fully operational Azure Arc-enabled servers environment.
ArcBox for IT Pros includes six Azure Arc-enabled servers resources and a single Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server resource as well. In addition, a built-in Azure Monitor workbook, Log Analytics, Microsoft Defender for Cloud (formerly known as Azure Security Center), Azure Sentinel, and a set of Azure Policies guest configurations are also included.
Support for ARM, Bicep and Terraform
Our commitment to the Jumpstart community is the most important thing to us and after hearing your feedback, today, we are happy to share that ArcBox for IT Pros is released with a couple of additional deployment options - Bicap and Terraform.
We will be also releasing ArcBox "Full" flavor Bicep and Terraform support soon as well as extending it to every new ArcBox flavor moving forward.
Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance “Business-Critical” support
With Azure Arc-enabled data services becoming more mature, we have now changed the default deployment of SQL Managed Instance to support business-critical workloads in the Full flavor of ArcBox.
Cluster API & Cluster API Provider for Azure with v1.1.0 support
Since day one, the "Full" ArcBox flavor automation for Azure Arc-enabled data services, is based on a Kubernetes cluster provisioned by leveraging the Cluster API (CAPI) project alongside the Cluster API Provider for Azure (CAPZ), as described
By working closely, both the Jumpstart and the CAPI/CAPZ teams are complementing each other’s projects and even do joint dev work. As a result, ArcBox is always up-to-date with the latest bits, including the recently announced production-ready CAPI version as well the CAPZ v1.1.0 release.
Getting started
Ready to give this a try?!