>> You've been hearing a lot about Azure Arc,
but what is an Azure Arc enabled Managed Instance?
Learn more in today's episode of Data Exposed.
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>> Hi. I'm Anna Hoffman
and welcome to this episode of Data Exposed.
Today, I'm joined by Vin Yu,
a Program Manager on the Azure Data team.
Thanks for joining us today, Vin.
>> Hey, Anna. Thanks. I'm happy to be on the show.
>> We're happy to have you.
Today, we're going to be talking about
Azure Arc enabled Managed Instance.
This has been a lot of buzz about this Azure Arc
and Arc enabled Managed Instance.
But I have one question to kick us off, what is that?
>> If you're familiar with Managed Instance,
this is pretty much the ability to run this anywhere
through Azure Arc.
This is going to enable you to bring your SQL Server workloads
and run anywhere and also take advantage
of some of those Azure SQL benefits
that you have in Azure as well.
Some of those managed capabilities such as monitoring
and some of those security benefits as well.
Most important of all, it runs anywhere.
>> Okay. Cool. That sounds pretty cool.
I'm interested to learn a little bit more,
I think you brought a few slides.
Do you want to go ahead and share
and take us through some of the details?
>> Yeah, for sure. Let me just show you my screen.
Before we go into too much of the technical details,
let's just take a look at some of the reasoning
why you might be interested in taking a look
at Azure Arc enabled Managed Instance.
If you've take a look at the environment today,
our customers are running many different applications
with many different architectures.
Some of them using VMs,
some of them using containers which is fairly new,
and increasingly so, some customers are even running
a simple more serverless environment as well.
As with time, customers are now running
with many different application languages as well.
Now, over time,
not only does the architecture of the application is changing,
we're also seeing a very diverse set of infrastructure as well.
Customers have multiple branches for their expanding businesses.
They're running it in multiple data centers,
not a single data center.
They're leveraging different OEM hardware.
Now, we're seeing even an increase in running of the Edge
or different Edge applications as well.
Now, to solve some of these problems
with the sprawl of the different apps
and the diverse infrastructures,
customers are actually taking advantage of the Cloud.
Now, some customers are able to move
their entire workload to the Cloud,
which greatly simplifies a lot of their management headaches.
But we also understand
that a lot of our customers and you as well
may be running your application across multiple Clouds,
or you're only able to move part of your application to the Cloud
and you're still not able to move all of it,
or there's many different reasons why you can't use
the Cloud at all altogether
and you would love to leverage some of those benefits.
This is where Azure Arc comes in
because the premise of what we're really doing here
is bringing Azure outside of the Microsoft Cloud
into your data center.
You could run Azure technologies
in the environment of your choice.
What does that mean for Arc enabled Managed Instance?
If you're familiar with Managed Instance,
one thing that you'll note on the very first out here I have that,
I'll put this product, is that it's always current.
As with Managed Instance, this product is always current,
it is a evergreen version of SQL,
and it will have automatic updates provided for you.
One key difference here and a benefit of this is,
it's going to be fully controlled by you.
You could choose when to upgrade.
For example, let's say you want updates
be applied to all your instances
on Saturday at 3:00 AM, you can do that as well.
The second is the elastic scale.
Just like in Azure, how easy it is to spin up new instances,
you could also do that with Azure Data Services
enabled through Azure Arc.
You could scale up and scale down as you need
for your Managed Instance
while maintaining the uptime
that's required for your applications to run.
There's automation of scale for various tasks.
For example, you want to do backup at scale,
you want to do all these security threat detections at scale,
this is all possible through this as well.
Last but not least is unified management.
One of those key points I talked about earlier
was that some of our customers have some
of their assets on-prem and some on the Azure.
If you go to Azure portal,
you could view all your Azure SQL resources,
which includes Azure Arc enabled Managed Instance.
You could use some of the other familiar tools
to manage your database as well.
For example, Azure Data Studio, SSMS,
or you could use the different tools that you're already using.
All of this works on any hardware,
on any Kubernetes, and you could run it
in a both fully disconnected fashion or a connected scenario.
Just to take a look at from at a glance and what this looks like
that's required for you to successfully run
the Azure Arc enabled Managed Instance.
First, what we requires that you bring
in your hardware and your Kubernetes.
You have the choice of hardware that you want.
Whether you want to provision your hardware from Azure Stack,
your existing hardware or on another Cloud, that's all possible.
On top of that, all we require is that you have Kubernetes,
so you could choose a variety of Kubernetes options.
Here, I have listed AKS as one that's on Azure
and Vanilla Kubernetes.
Then from there, this is where we start bringing in
some of that stack magic.
The first thing that you'll do in order to use
Azure Arc Data Services
that you would lay down this data controller.
In the middle here, you see the Azure Arc management piece.
This is going to help you do all those things
such as provisioning, set up HA,
it's going to provide backups, updates, diagnostics,
and all the other Azure goodness as well.
Then from there, you could just provision
your various data services,
which includes Azure Arc enabled Managed Instance.
You can connect to it using the apps of your choice.
>> Thanks, Vin. This is really interesting.
There are a lot of game changers
but there are really two things that stood out to me
at least at first glance.
One is this idea of getting evergreen or versionless SQL
outside of Azure wherever you are.
That's a huge game changer.
The other game changer to me is how you can use
the same skills that you've been using for SQL Server,
but now, you can use them on top of Kubernetes.
You can use them on top of other Clouds,
but you're still going to be able to get
things like versionless SQL and that management
that before, you could only get in Azure.
So that's really cool.
I would love if you could show us an example of this in action.
>> Yeah, for sure. Let me go ahead and get to my demo.
Here, what you see on my screen is my Azure Data Studio.
I'm actually connected to my Azure Arc data controller
and this data controller help me provision
all the Azure Arc enabled Managed Instances.
You notice here it looks actually quite like Azure,
whereas it's showing things like name,
the region, the resource group, subscription IDs,
and this is all what you would see in Azure as well.
This is because I have my instance
connected to Azure at the moment
so you see some of these properties pop up.
Here in the bottom, you can see a few
of the Azure Arc enabled Managed Instances.
Let's go ahead and take a look at one of them.
I'm going to click on "Miaademo."
Here, again, you also see a very similar set
of essential properties at the very top.
But on top of that,
one thing I like to really point out here
is actually these service endpoints here.
I have something called a Kibana and Grafana dashboard.
One of those things I mentioned earlier on
was that we are trying to take some of the goodness of Azure,
at least some of those ideas as well,
and bring them to you no matter where you are.
If I click on "Grafana Dashboard,"
and what this is is a monitoring dashboard
that's built into the product.
For every Azure Arc enabled Managed Instance,
we're actually providing a built-in dashboard
from all those monitoring needs.
Let's take a look at the last hour here.
You can see that just quickly before earlier and point in time,
you can see that I have some transactions per second.
There was some data workload and it stopped about 30 minutes ago,
just right before we're having this conversation here.
I didn't want to take on my Internet bandwidth.
As you can see, that's all happening and that's good.
We have all these different ways we're actually providing,
monitoring experiences for you.
Things that you care about like wait stats,
different database activities or SQL Server activities as well.
This is just one of those things I talked about
in terms of bringing the goodness of Azure to you
no matter where you choose to run your workload.
Over time, what you're going to see is,
we're just really just scratching the surface here on this page.
We only have the monitoring capability shown for now,
but over time, you're really going to see a lot more built-in.
Now, if I go to our portal as well,
one thing you're going to note
is that I have exactly the same miaademo resource open here
and I have this on this page.
Notice I have a very similar trend
of my activity that was happening about an hour ago,
and it stopped just half an hour ago because of this call.
But notice here, you're also able to monitor
your instances in Azure as well.
If you could connect all your resources to Azure,
you could manage it all from a single plane of glass.
This is one benefit of where we're trying to unify
the management experiences as well.
>> Thanks, Vin. That's really cool.
I like how you proved it with the same database
because you showed us in the Azure portal and in Azure Data Studio.
I think this service is available in preview today.
It's really cool to see the progress.
I'm sure there's lots of more things coming down the pipeline
and lots more things we haven't even seen today.
But if we want to give our users something to do
or something to get started with,
what do you think the best way to get started with this would be?
>> I think that given that this product is constantly evolving,
I definitely will share some resources and links
in this video below.
Do check those links out.
We keep that [inaudible].
You could check out the latest and greatest there.
>> Awesome.
So not only can you get versionless SQL anywhere,
but you can also get versionless documentation in the Cloud.
>> Yes, for sure. That's always kept up to date.
>> Awesome. Well, thanks so much
for being on the show today, Vin,
and sharing with us Azure Arc enabled Managed Instance.
I learned a few things and I'm sure our viewers did as well.
For our viewers, if you like this video, please like this video,
subscribe to our channel,
and leave us a comment, and let us know what you think
of Azure Arc enabled Managed Instance.
We hope to see you next time on Data Exposed.
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