We are excited to bring Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes to general availability at our Spring Ignite event. Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes enables you to attach any CNCF-conformant Kubernetes cluster to Azure for management. Your clusters can run anywhere, and if they have connectivity to Azure, onboarding is as easy as deploying the Azure Arc cluster agents using the Azure CLI extension.
Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes connects your cluster to Azure Resource Manager, providing a system-assigned managed identity and enabling the Azure Portal, CLI, and REST APIs. You may attach a cluster to any Azure subscription and resource group. As a resource in Azure, you can apply tags, control access using Azure Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and search across all your entire inventory with Azure Resource Graph.
Beyond inventory
Now that your clusters are attached to Azure, customers may also use GitOps to define, apply, and monitor their cluster configuration on one, ten, or hundreds of clusters. Whether you are a cluster administrator working to ensure clusters are configured consistently across your enterprise, or an application development team shipping your applications to a Kubernetes namespace, Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes can help. Attach and manage multiple configurations for your clusters using the Azure Portal and CLI, or use Azure Policy to apply your configurations automatically.
Even better, the GitOps functionality is powered by Flux, so you gain the benefit of the open-source ecosystem with integration into Azure tooling. Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes GA adds additional regional support, expands options to authenticate to private git endpoints, and adds support for tokens and pre-generated SSH keys. For a great deep dive, check out our Tech Community GitOps article from September.
Broad Kubernetes support
Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes meets you where you are with your existing Kubernetes investments. Any CNCF-conformant Kubernetes can host the Azure Arc agent and gain the benefits of cloud-based management. In addition to that broad support, we have worked with a set of validation partners to ensure that Azure Arc works well with those distributions. In addition to our existing partners, including Red Hat OpenShift, Canonical Charmed Kubernetes, and Rancher we are happy to add VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and Nutanix Karbon to the list of validation partners. Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes is also integrated with Microsoft first-party offerings, including AKS on Azure Stack HCI and Azure Stack Edge, giving you lots of options for where and how you adopt Kubernetes.
If you are a Kubernetes provider and are interested in participating in Arc Validation Program, please contact us here, or read more about the program here.
Jumpstart and next steps
We have also created the Azure Arc Jumpstart project which brings together a set of Azure Arc scenarios under one roof. Jumpstart focuses on getting you up and running quickly for experimentation and learning across multiple Azure Arc scenarios. In addition, we have recently launched the Jumpstart YouTube channel with lots of short demos.
Head over to the Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes documentation and attach your first cluster.