>> Welcome back for another episode of the Azure Enablement Show.
Today I have Lior with me to learn all about
the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes Landing Zone Accelerator.
After watching the episode,
check out the links and the description in
the show notes below and if you have any questions,
feel free to leave a comment and
don't forget to hit the subscribe button.
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Welcome back. My name is Thomas and
I'm here with Lior to talk about
the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes Landing Zone Accelerator.
But first, before we talk about this,
this is obviously all about hybrid and multi-Cloud,
so Lior, can you tell us a little bit why this is important?
>> For sure Thomas. If you remember back in January,
we released the first accelerator that was
the accelerator for Azure Arc-enabled servers.
Now, as we are getting more
mature with the hybrid technologies that we are developing
here in Microsoft and obviously Azure Arc
is in the middle of those Azure hybrid technologies,
we decided to take it
one step further and develop this accelerator,
which we're going to talk about today.
To take a step back why this is so important.
The hybrid and the multi-Cloud motion is not going to stop.
This is literally going to be
the defector standard for a lot of the organizations.
What we want it to do is we want it
to accelerate, no pun intended,
the way that we are delivering the suite of
products or suite of features and
capabilities when it comes to Azure hybrid,
that includes Azure Arc,
it includes Azure Stack HCI,
AKS on HCI and
all these technologies are coming together into one single motion,
which is Azure hybrid and
multi-Cloud. That's why it's so important and again,
this is going to be the standard for
many organizations moving forward.
>> It's awesome and again, it's a very important initiative,
when we talk about hybrid and multi-Cloud.
You quickly mentioned Azure Arc and obviously we
talked a lot before and we talk a lot about that,
it's one of our main offerings
when it comes to hybrid and multi-Cloud.
For those people who don't know what Azure Arc is,
can you quickly explain what it is?
>> Of course. Azure Arc is really
a set or a suite of technologies that are designed to
either bring the IT assets and services and
applications into Azure that are
deployed outside of Azure by definition,
or it's designed to deploy
Azure services like SQL engine instance or possible SQL,
app services, machine learning.
The way that we are doing this is by stretching our control plane.
What does that really mean? The control plane
is really Azure resource manager.
That's the operating system of Azure.
That's what we always like to say.
What we're doing with Azure,
we're bringing all the richness of
Azure into the outside world and being
able to either bring resources in or deploy resources using Azure.
>> That's pretty awesome. Again, we obviously need that very
much when it comes to hybrid and that really
enables our customers with this.
The landing zone accelerators they're part of
the Cloud adoption scenarios
and can you quickly tell us, what that is?
>> Few months back, we decided that we now need
to come together as a subject matter experts,
groups of people here in Microsoft and
really invest the time on providing
guidance on how should you actually approach hybrid architecture?
How do you as a customer as an organization,
want to adopt architectures that are based on
resources or IT assets that are deployed in Azure,
but also on premises and in other Cloud.
What we wanted to do with the Cloud adoption
framework hybrid and multi-Cloud scenario
is basically create this set of
reference architectures, guidance, best practices,
design considerations, recommendations and
also reference implementation in order for you to go and
start using Azure hybrid multi-Cloud in
the right way the way that we see
it and gets our seal of approval.
That's really how everything started and we actually released
our new enhancement to that back in
January with the Azure Arc-enabled servers
Landing Zone Accelerator.
>> That's awesome. Again, the hybrid,
the multi-Cloud scenario is super
helpful for our customers when they are in
a situation to implement this and that has
all these best practices and architectures,
as you mentioned, all in one place.
Obviously, I want to ask you,
we offer all this information now,
how do we actually help customers to implement all of that?
>> We started with
basically a reference implementations to do this type of stuff.
But before I'm talking about the reference implementation there,
I wanted to talk to you about the
critical design areas that we developed
for Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes Landing Zone Accelerators.
When we develop servers and we released that back in January,
we had seven critical design areas for Azure Arc-enabled servers.
This time using Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes,
we actually developed 10 critical design areas
because of the breadth of
the technologies and the ecosystem of
Kubernetes and there's so much ground to cover really.
When you're thinking about Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes
were thinking about not just the infrastructure stack,
but you also want to understand
how a developer experience will look like.
What are the services that are
integrating into these type of technologies?
We just came up with 10 critical design areas that we are
covering as you can see in front of you
and those critical design areas,
each and every one of those are covered in
really the best practices covering really
the considerations and the things that you want to know
before you go by and start designing this at scale.
These are the critical design areas
for Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes.
Now in terms of the reference implementation, what we did,
we actually created
a new reference implementation for the accelerator.
Again, back in January when release servers we
created a new flavor of ArcBox.
ArcBox is part of the Jumpstart Project and it's basically
a single unit of deployment that we
developed in order for us to actually experience everything.
Now, we took the same approach with
Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes and as you can
see with the architecture in front of you,
we created ArcBox for DevOps,
which we released this week.
Now what we're doing with DevOps,
we basically created a reference implementation
that is focusing on
the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes set of
technologies and all the integrations that you see here.
This flavor is designed to bring you up
to speed when it comes to the extensions,
when it comes to the service discoverability, GitOps processes,
secret managements, and things that you really need to
take into account when it comes to
this type of technologies and obviously this complement
all the critical design areas for
Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes that are just talked about before.
>> That's awesome. Again, I love that we bring
all these critical design areas together and help our customers,
especially now, while Kubernetes is
becoming more and more important for a lot of organizations.
They're not just running Kubernetes in Azure,
but they also run Kubernetes on prem or at
other Cloud providers and Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes really helps
them to integrate that and bring that in
a single control plane and also allow a couple of other scenarios
like deploying obviously Azure Pass Services and
Azure Data Services in these locations as well.
That is pretty awesome.
Now, you covered that already a little bit.
But what does the landing zone actually include?
Can you talk a little bit about more details on that as well?
>> Sure. The landing zone accelerator
include 10 critical design areas.
It also include their reference implementation and it
also basically include all the jelloing pieces.
The things that you need to think about in terms
of cross-referencing between those critical design areas.
For us, it's not enough for just
developing those critical design areas,
it's also important for us to make sure that
when you are reading one critical design areas,
we're making those mental connections for you.
What are the things that you need to take
under consideration with regards or
with relationship to the other critical design areas.
This is super important for
our viewers to understand because for us,
everything comes together as a single thing.
It's not just about reading things in an isolation,
it's really about to have an holistic,
complete story around how do you go by an architect
Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes Landings
on accelerator or a foundation in your organization.
The last piece, Thomas,
that I really want to bring up is the fact that
Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes is really a foundation,
a fundamental building block
for everything that will come after that.
Azure Arc-enabled data service.
You mentioned, past services so Azure Arc-enabled Data services,
machine learning, app services,
all those technologies are relying on the fact that you
have an Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes enabled cluster.
Part of this accelerator is also to show
you how things are going to look like in the future for you.
>> Again. This is fantastic and it really excites me also.
If you look at these different combinations,
we've Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes,
but then also bringing in, for example,
our AKS on ash stack HCI
or Windows Server and having that full solution set.
Really excited for everything which is also coming there.
Obviously when we talk about hybrid and multi-Cloud,
sometimes things are hard to try out.
Obviously, we love when people can try out and
integrate it in their local environment,
but often they don't have
access to it or don't have the resources to spin up
all these testing environments
and stuff like that on premises or anywhere else.
Do we offer something to people to try this out?
>> Yeah. ArcBox for DevOps is really our reference implementation.
You can go check it out in the Jumpstart Project web page.
What we did with this addition is really try to give
you everything which just you need to bring your own subscription.
There are no constraints.
You don't need to have a physical environment.
You don't need to have an environment outside of Azure.
All you need is a subscription so you can go and deploy that.
One of the things that we include there,
there is part of the enhancements that we worked on
in the previous version and we took for this version as well,
or this flavor like we like to call it in
the Jumpstart Project is basically all four methods of deployment.
You have on templates,
you have the portal experience,
Terraform and of course BICEP is
also another implementation that we support.
You can choose whatever it is that you feel you're comfortable,
the result will be the same.
You will get an ArcBox DevOps,
fully deployed environment so you can go and check it out and
actually get going with
Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes and while doing so,
thinking about the critical design areas we develop for you.
>> Absolutely fantastic. Lior,
if people are now interested to
learn more about this, where do they go?
>> Obviously, we're going to share the link
for the new accelerator.
This is going to be part of the Cloud adoption
framework web page in documentations.
Also, go to the Jumpstart,
start checking out the ArcBox for DevOps.
Obviously, we're going to have links for you
as part of the accelerator itself in
Azure Docs and these are
the two resources that I can highly recommend.
>> Awesome. Thank you very much,
Lior and thank you everyone watching and don't forget how to check
out the Cloud adoption framework on aka.ms/adopt.
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