Say Yes to Azure Arc
? Amit Khanna ?
Cloud Security : Cloud Architecture : Solution Architecture : Technology Leader : Ex-Microsoft
Today's Reality
?Multi-cloud or hybrid cloud is the ultimate reality of today. When the adoption of the public cloud started, it was a roadmap for a few customers to move their workloads to the public cloud as much as possible. It was not feasible to commit 100% move from On-prem to Public cloud due to multiple reasons :
?As "One size doesn’t fit all", it is true in technology as well. It could be possible that one platform or solution may not fit your needs. As a result, our partners and customers have a presence on multiple public clouds including their private cloud.
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What challenges partners are facing?
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In the beginning, everything was perfect when partners leveraged the same management solutions for IaaS workloads in the public cloud & did additional deployment in the public cloud to support IaaS workloads. They will pay additional charges/licensing costs to the current vendor whose solution is in use + Azure infrastructure costs ( if any ). However, things got changed & this is how the real world from the partner or customer side will look like :
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Multiple solutions deployed within multiple clouds for IaaS workloads.
?Although leveraging one solution within multiple clouds is ok but if there are multiple solutions ( monitoring, patching, policy/compliance & many more)?to be implemented and maintained in multiple clouds, it will increase efforts & complexity.
These solutions are very common which every partner/customer needs.
?This created additional work for the partners & customers operations team to manage solutions within multiple clouds and integrate them with ticketing & reporting solutions.
?Cloud-native solutions are deployed within each cloud for IaaS workloads.
?Customers / Partners deploy and configure cloud-native solutions for governance and management.
??Requirement for skilled professionals to manage these multiple clouds: L1 team
?As per the customer/partner needs, they will have a level 1 (L1) team for each public cloud that does monitoring of the infrastructure, alerting, and reporting. They will have dashboards from the respective public clouds for governance and management perspectives.
?Now these professionals especially L1, need to be managed from an RBAC perspective into cloud-native IAM solutions of respective public clouds.
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?How Azure Arc can help?
?One of the use cases for Azure Arc is hybrid and multi-cloud management & most of these capabilities can be achieved via Azure Arc enabled Servers.
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Partners / Customers may ask: What's in it for me? Another solution to replace my existing solution. The benefits they will have are as follows :
?Single View & Control plane :
?No matter where the customer has IaaS workloads, it can be monitored through Azure Arc ( via Azure Monitor ). So, no repeated deployments of existing monitoring solutions & its supporting infrastructure for monitoring needs in each public cloud.
?Cloud Ops team has complete visibility of which endpoints are being managed & where are they located ( Azure or another public cloud ).
Management & Governance Solutions :
?With Azure Arc enabled for servers, we can leverage a variety of native tools as part of governance & management like
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??Maintain Security Posture :
?Security is another focussed area where customers/partners spend a good amount of time selecting the right set of tools to maintain the security posture of the multiple environments where they have a presence.
?With Azure Arc, we can extend additional services to the workloads outside azure via the following tools :
?With the right set of tools based on the needs, partners/customers can define the overall security posture.
?Value Add & Benefits
?The advantage of leveraging Azure native solutions to address your needs is that all these services have
While the above talking points, answer the technology side of building a use case & adoption, how does it solve the problem from skilled professionals management?
?It is very common for Partners to have shared/dedicated L1 teams to support multiple cloud providers & the partners have some process to manage L1 RBAC within each cloud provider console.
?With Azure Arc, Partners can consolidate on the following :
?With the combination of the above 2 factors, partners can build a use case for PoC or adoption with their existing customers.
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Azure Arc USP
?Hybrid and multi-cloud management is one of the use cases of Azure Arc but in my opinion, the USP is running Azure native/PaaS services outside Azure, on the existing infrastructure of the customers/partners where they have already made an investment and cannot move to the cloud due to certain requirements.
Even the partners when start adopting Azure Arc, they unlock this use case of running Azure services via Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes. This can help them to do a PoC and position this to the customers who want to remain on-premise but want the capabilities of the Cloud.
Summary
?I would strongly recommend evaluating Azure Arc from all the use cases like running Azure services anywhere and not just another hybrid and multi-cloud management solution.
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More Info :
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Technical Specialist, Architect - Data & AI at Microsoft
2 年This is fantastic !! Keep writing..