Azure Arc. What is it?
Why are we gonna use it?
And most importantly, how do we get this thing going?
Well, as always, when we talk about ‘What is Azure?’
I'm gonna tell you all about it, coming up now.
Hello everybody, my name is Adam Gordon,
an edutainer here at ITPROTV,
back with another exciting episode
in our ‘What is Azure?’ serial.
In this conversation,
we're gonna be tackling ‘What is Azure Arc?’
A brand-new offering from Microsoft
that is really exciting, and we're gonna tackle it
with our three traditional questions
and help you to understand what it is.
We've got some cool stuff we'll talk about to explain that.
Why you may want to use it.
And most importantly,
how we actually make this thing work for us,
and we'll take a look at how to implement Azure Arc
after we're done talking about the cool little diagram
I have here on the lightboard.
Let's jump in and begin by talking about what Azure Arc is.
When we think about Azure Arc,
what we see on the diagram is the ability
to use different distinct areas where we often
will have infrastructure or services at our beck
and call in our organizations.
Traditionally, we'll have on-premises infrastructure,
what we call our rack and stack environment,
where, in our data centers we have servers,
we have desktops, we have all sorts of stuff
that is living in our buildings, in our facilities,
and of course, stacked up for us to use.
It's probably been there for a long time,
and it's still a very important part of what we do
to provide services every day.
But we also have one or more cloud environments,
like Microsoft Azure, that are becoming much, much
more important to our ability to not only
provide infrastructure, and the services to use that infrastructure.
But, to do so at scale globally,
or across our operational landscape,
wherever that may be, and to do that to tens,
hundreds, perhaps, thousands of individual customers and users.
But these days, to do so, spreading our risk
and our capability throughout multiple cloud vendors,
hence the idea of multi-cloud, because we may not
want to put all of our cloud eggs into one cloud basket.
So, we see things like AWS, Google Cloud Platform,
Oracle, and Dell/VMWare's business cloud platforms,
available to us more and more, and being used
by organizations side-by-side with Microsoft Azure,
and with our on-premises environments.
In addition, we see newer technology capabilities
being brought in from what we call
Edge computing and Edge platforms.
You would think of these in your personal life
as an IoT, an internet of things device.
Whether you have Alexa, whether you have Cortana.
Whether you have one or more
home automation platforms that you're using.
Whether you are using remote management capabilities
for far-flung infrastructure to monitor, to maintain, to operate.
Whether you may have some sort
of assembly line automation capability
in your business or any kind of devices
that are IP-enabled and are designed specifically
to work in these environments, we're seeing more and more
that these capabilities are also becoming part
of what we have to manage.
So, when we see all of this individually, kind of,
isolated from each other, this is our proto-typical,
traditional world.
What Azure Arc brings to us is the ability to be able
to link these together and allow them to interact with each other.
Giving us the capability to see, to manage at scale,
to automate and optimize the capabilities
that these individual platforms provide,
but to do so by bringing them all together
so we can see them, interact with them
in one common management or monitoring capability.
So, that's really the ‘what,’ being able to bring these
infrastructure elements under management.
Leads us to the ‘why.’ And I've kind of hinted
at the answer to the ‘why’ already,
a single management interface that we can leverage
wherever we are sitting, to be able to make that available
to our management and monitoring teams.
We're thinking our ability for either global management
in our network operation center, maybe regionally
in one of our localized management areas,
or either from our on-premises environment,
or from the Edge, or from the multi-cloud,
or from all of them.
Our ability to see one but interact with all.
So, the ‘why’ is really about creating
and using what we call, commonly,
a single pane of glass management capability.
The idea of interacting with, managing,
and seeing all this infrastructure in one place
becomes really, really important.
And as we draw our arrows to bring that capability in,
we see that on any of these monitoring screens.
In theory, we should be able to interact with and see all of this.
Now, this is important,
but what we're really addressing here is...
We talk about this, is the ability, at scale,
to really think about managing and minimizing at the same time.
Managing infrastructure, globally scaling it,
optimizing it, and making it work for us,
even across multiple vendor stacks, but at the same time minimizing.
What do we want to minimize?
We want to minimize risk and threat
because when we think about multi-cloud environments,
on-premises capabilities, edge computing capabilities,
there are unique and specific threats, risks,
and vulnerabilities associated with each of these areas.
Wouldn't it be great if we can collapse them all together,
monitor and maintain them in one area,
and ultimately not only expose them and manage them
but secure them and understand how they're functioning
without having to go to each individual area to do so?
This is the beauty of the ‘why.’
Management at scale.
Across all our infrastructure elements, one pane of glass.
One visible element to manage
and ultimately help us to understand them all.
When we think about ‘how,’ our last question,
you know, if you've watched any of our episodes in the series,
we always transition over to our demo environment
where I show you how to spin up
and ultimately set up and perhaps even configure
certain elements of this particular... any particular service.
We're gonna do that for Azure Arc as well,
but I just want to remind you of something
when we're talking about Azure Arc.
It's a brand-new offering and as we look a ‘how,’
it may look a little different over time,
so be on the lookout for not only how to do this,
but updates and changes as you go to deploy Azure Arc.
I'll see you when we talk about how to do this
in just a moment,
and while I'm getting ready to do this demonstration,
think about all the cool things we can do,
and all the cool administration capabilities, architecture,
and infrastructure you're gonna bring to bear
when you start using Azure Arc.
All right everybody, time to actually roll up our sleeves,
get out those fingers, and we're gonna see
how we actually bring Azure Arc online and get it ready.
We're gonna search for Azure Arc
as a service in the Azure portal.
I've already logged on, just making that step
a little bit easier for us to skip over.
All services is where we're gonna begin.
We're gonna type in under the all-services search bar,
beginning to type Azure,
we'll see Azure Arc pops up on the list.
It's not necessarily alphabetized,
but it should show up near the top, so just look for it.
You'll see I've highlighted it over to the right.
Let me go ahead and click on it.
When I do that,
we'll be able to see the Azure Arc landing page.
We're on the overview pane or tab,
and we see the get started area.
We've got some resources
that can be brought under management here;
a smattering and an interaction with both on-premises,
in our rack and stack environment in the data center;
things like servers that can be on-premises;
as well as hosted in the cloud fabric; Kubernetes clusters;
databases; a variety of different resources
that are available to us.
As we go down below there, we do see cost and pricing,
and we'll take a look at that in just a minute.
Now, on the getting started tab,
what we see is the ability to be able to...
Just bring that over there so we can see it...
add in existing infrastructure, with a little link
that takes us there immediately.
Things like servers and Kubernetes clusters.
Notice it says we can add them to Azure for free,
paying only for additional Azure services you use,
and there's an invitational little link there to learn more.
You can add that existing infrastructure
and Microsoft Azure and Azure Arc
will manage it for you without additional cost.
When you add additional services on top
that you wouldn't normally use,
the Azure Sentinel solution as part
of the Azure Security Center, perhaps other services or capabilities;
we pay for that, it's a pay-as-you-go model,
we simply extend that use to this part of the platform
and then we pay for those services.
So, we get some for free and some we have to pay for.
We could go ahead,
and you'll see we can deploy Azure data services anywhere.
Deploy and use those data services in
and on the Kubernetes clusters we run, and again,
manage those through the Azure Arc capability.
Remember, single pane of glass, one environment
that shows us everything that gives those capabilities.
Then view all of our Azure Arc resources down here...
Just means we can essentially have a shortcut
right to that link that says all Azure Arc resources.
So, we're really adding in and deploying those capabilities,
and we can see those resources are individually listed.
Now, notice that a lot of them have the word preview
in parentheses at the end of their name.
It means currently Microsoft
is essentially test driving these features.
bringing them online as part of the Azure Arc offering,
and over time, that preview tag will disappear
and it'll look like the word servers,
and they'll be fully available.
They may change a little bit as that process takes place,
and over time, Microsoft has made clear
on their roadmap that there'll be additional offerings
made available through Azure Arc,
but it's early in the deployment and therefore
we're just really now beginning to see
what that story's gonna unfold like.
When we look at pricing, just to give you a sense
of what I talked about here, it does show us,
and I like the fact that Microsoft is very up front
about what you get for free and then
what you pay for down below,
with additional services like Azure Security Center,
Azure Monitoring, Azure Policy, etc.
Again, subject to change
as Microsoft modifies these systems over time.
Currently, Kubernetes is free,
as you bring on Kubernetes resources you may pay
for that at some point in the future.
So, just keep that in mind.
With regards to actually going in
and deploying any one of these resource areas,
servers let's say, hypothetically
if we want to add that infrastructure,
we select one of those areas, use the add button,
walk through one of, or more than one of our wizard tabs
to facilitate whatever we want to ring online,
providing appropriate information.
As we go through,
you can see each one of these lets us see, interact with,
or have access to, already existing infrastructure as needed.
I haven't deployed any servers yet,
so I don't see any of my Kubernetes capabilities.
My SQL server database, or databases,
can be deployed here, and if I have and data controllers
that I want to deploy, I can add those,
and/or I can see any of my Azure Stack capabilities,
again, that would be exposed from other areas of the Azure portal.
By bringing all this together in one place
and making it available, we've got this single instance,
a single pane of glass that I can use to manage.
Some of you may say,
‘Well, Adam, this is good,
but didn't we already have this capability in Azure,
just by using the portal?’
Well, we did, but we had to go
to a lot of different places to see it,
and only would we be able to see
the Azure-centric infrastructure,
not the on-premises infrastructure,
and not the multi-cloud infrastructure.
Now, we're extending that capability
beyond the boundary of Azure to include
all those additional elements, and as a result,
we're really scaling up and scaling out our single pane of glass,
truly seeing all those things that make up
our operational capabilities in our infrastructure
across the entire operational landscape
of our business, globally if necessary.
I'll be back with additional features, capabilities,
and always updating our ‘What is Azure?’
thought process to include new services, new features,
and new elements that you want to be aware of.
Until I come back with another exciting look at Azure services,
I'm gonna wish you happy Azuring, and I'll see you soon.