Steve Buchanan - Azure Arc-Enabled Kubernetes and Servers: Extending Hyperscale Cloud Management to Your Datacenter

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Today, hybrid and multicloud scenarios are critical for many organizations. There is a lot of momentum for building and implementing a hybrid and multicloud strategy. Based on studies, 90% of enterprises depend on hybrid and 93% have a multicloud strategy.

Microsoft Azure is an open, flexible, enterprise-grade cloud computing platform that provides all the services and features required to help you build and operate your technology solutions in the cloud. However, we understand that there are several reasons and motivations that drive the necessity of using multiple private and/or public clouds. Avoiding single cloud provider lock-in, addressing regulatory and data sovereignty requirements, improving business continuity, and maximizing performance by running applications close to user locations to avoid latency are all common business drivers to architect and build hybrid and multicloud environments. That is why Microsoft Azure is built from the ground up to support hybrid environments.

To quote our Azure Engineering lead and Executive Vice President Jason Zander at Microsoft: Hybrid is not just an in-between state until everything is moved to the cloud, it will be an end state for many of our customers.

Running in hybrid, multicloud, and edge environments not only adds more complexity, but also often leads to an increase in operating costs and challenges when it comes to governance and compliance. With the Azure Resource Manager and additional Azure management services, Microsoft offers a strong management solution for resources and services deployed in Microsoft Azure. With Azure Arc, we are extending the management capabilities, and a number of the services to environments outside of the Azure cloud, to address these challenges. Now you can use Azure as a single control plane for your hybrid and multicloud environments.

With Azure Arc we offer two high level pillars: Azure Arc enabled infrastructure and Azure Arc enabled services. Azure Arc enabled infrastructure allows you to connect existing infrastructure, such as Windows and Linux servers, as well as Kubernetes clusters running outside of Azure to the Azure control plane to get visibility, and to organize and manage these resources. Azure Arc enabled services allow you to deploy Azure services such as Azure data or Azure application services anywhere. This allows you to build consistent hybrid and multicloud architectures, as well as using the cloud-native tooling for your IT operations, DevOps, and developer processes.

This book, by two industry leading Azure experts, introduces you to the fundamentals of hybrid, multicloud, and edge computing. I have known Steve Buchanan and John Joyner for more than a decade now as valued members in the Microsoft MVP program and personally as friends. Their book provides you insights into Azure Native Management tooling for managing servers and Kubernetes clusters, running both on-premises and other cloud providers. They teach you how to leverage the Azure control plane to get visibility and management capabilities with Azure Arc, which are extremely useful to strengthen your security and governance posture. They also show how to leverage Azure Arc to seamlessly deliver Azure Monitor and/or Azure Sentinel, and achieve regulatory compliance with industry standards using Azure Arc, delivering Azure Policy from Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

An added bonustheir book also provides context on how to set up GitOps using Azure Arc in a hybrid and multicloud environment to empower your DevOps teams to perform tasks that typically fall under IT operations, and much more. In short, if you and your organization are running workloads in a hybrid or multicloud environment, this is the book for you.

-Thomas Maurer

Senior Cloud Advocate

Microsoft

October 2021