[Inaudible].
What's up Club Gurus.
Welcome back to another episode of Azure Service Spotlight. I'm Brian Roehm.
And today we'll be taking a look at another Azure service to discover what it's
all about. In this episode, we'll be exploring Azure Arc.
Real-world cloud is often messy with complex environments,
spread out across multiple clouds, edge and on premises.
If this sounds like your organization,
Azure Arc can help you to deploy Azure services anywhere
and allow you to manage them across your environment with a familiar Azure
interface. In other words, Arc can help you get and stay organized,
which means more coffee breaks for you
In its current state, Azure Arc delivers three capabilities. Well,
two of the three capabilities, but we'll talk about that more in a minute.
With Arc server management,
you can manage virtual machines and physical machines running outside of Azure.
This can be on prem or virtual machines with other cloud providers.
You can also manage and register Kubernetes clusters,
regardless of where they're located. Finally,
you can run and manage as your SQL and PostgreSQL, including Hyperscale,
in Kubernetes clusters outside of Azure.
Unfortunately at the time of this filming,
this last feature is in preview and requires a signup form to request access to
try it out.
So what sort of crazy wizardry do I need to get all of this connected and
working? Well, the good news here is almost nothing.
Basically you have to be running an eligible operating system.
This is virtually any Windows or Linux operating system. Other than that,
you install a client on your target system and you will be up and ready to go.
Alright, I can see what you're thinking. So Azure outside of Azure,
it's pretty easy to set up, but what exactly do I do with it?
I'm glad you asked. In order to give you a proper explanation,
I first need to talk to you about Fabric. Azure Fabric to be precise.
In Azure, every resource is managed by something called a control plane.
In Azure that control plane is called the Azure Fabric Controller.
Whenever you provision a resource,
the operation runs through this Fabric controller.
In between the resource and the control plane lives an Azure Resource Manager,
or ARM. This ARM layer lets you configure those resources.
As you can imagine this control plane only lives inside Azure.
You step outside of that, say into AWS or an on prem server,
you step outside of that control plane,
and Azure Arc acts like an extension that can expand that control plane to
resources outside of Azure. It allows you to push policies, patching,
run security audits, automated updates,
and gather intelligence on the health of the system all from within Azure.
If you're an ops team and trying to manage resources in Azure, AWS, Google,
the edge and those servers on prem, man,
it can be a nightmare to control the environment.
Especially if you have multiple departments,
all controlling different cloud platforms. Arc is a solution to that problem,
allowing for the organization and governance across multiple platforms.
And don't forget that this is not just servers.
It's also Kubernetes clusters as well. Alright, I can see it.
You're getting excited, huh? But there's still a couple of skeptics in the back.
I can see you shaking your head saying, yeah, Brian, that sounds awesome,
but how much is it? Unfortunately, the answer right now is I have no idea.
It's still in preview, which means it's completely free right now.
Down the road, that's obviously going to change.
So it's definitely something to keep an eye on.
By now you probably have a decent feel for what Arc is, but seeing is believing.
So let's transition over to take a look at Arc in action.
Alright, so now we find ourselves in portal.azure.com.
And what I want to do is I want to talk to you a little bit about what Azure Arc
does and actually show you how it works. So to start off with,
we find ourselves in the all services section,
and I want to jump over and show you the resources so you can see how
this plays together.
So let's pick a specific resource group that I set
up for this.
And you can see here that I have all of the resources within this network
watcher resource group that I've created.
And so you can see virtual machines and network security groups and storage
accounts. And also you'll see this machine Azure Arc mixed in here.
So this is actually an Amazon web services virtual machine
that I have configured and installed Azure Arc software on.
So we are actually looking in Azure at our resource group and we can see a
combination of all of our resources.
So if I threw Google Virtual Machines in here or I through servers from an on
premise network,
you can sort and see all of those right within your normal
resource tab in Azure.
But let's jump over and take a look at how Azure Arc works.
So you can access it just by searching for the resource.
And you can see here that we can create a manage server.
So we're going to go ahead and do that,
and it will pull up the one resource that I had already linked that I just
showed you.
And let's go ahead and add in a second one so I can show you how that works.
So to do it, we just simply go to the add machines, generate script button.
We're going to choose our resource group and we can set proxy servers
and things like that. If we're interested in the core set tags,
but for this case,
I'm going to go ahead and just come down here and we are ready to go.
It's actually generated my script. This is the script here,
and now we're ready to go ahead and install that on our machine.
So I'm going to transport you from Azure into
AWS.
And you can see here that I have installed a T2 micro
virtual machine.
And so I'm going to switch over and show you that virtual machine.
Now it's a Windows 2019 server.
And so we'll transition over and now we find ourselves in this server
and to get this to work,
I just need to install that software and I can do it by simply going to
PowerShell. And of course, there's multiple ways to get here,
but you can do it quickly just by using PowerShell.
And so I'm going to show you that way now for convenience sake.
So let me just grab this PowerShell window and drag it over so we can see.
So let me copy that script
and paste that in here.
And so it's going to go ahead and download the package that I need and
install it here. So you can see those are those two commands.
So PowerShell is going to work and it's finding the files that I need and
installing those.
And you can see that it's already prefilled in my resource group, my location,
my subscription ID, all the things that I need to have to make this work.
And so that click,
what we've done is we have downloaded the package that we needed.
We have installed the package using this command,
and then we have run a connect command to connect that to our
resource group, tenant ID, location, and subscription ID.
And all that's left to do is simply sign into a web browser.
So I'm going to just simply grab this page here.
There is my window. So I pulled up that website, pulled it over here,
and then I'm just going to grab this code here
and paste it back into my web browser.
And then I need to log into my Azure machine.
So I will pull this back over, log into my Azure machine,
and then we'll jump over and finish out this connection. Okay.
And now you can see that we have connected our machine agent.
So switching back over here, we're actually all done.
I can click back to Azure Arc,
refresh my screen here,
and you can now see that we have our newly connected machine to Azure Arc.
Now what makes this extremely cool is after clicking on it,
I can actually go in and you can see, I can push policies,
can manage access control. If I wish to add monitoring,
I can set up insights and logs so I can actually see what's happening in my
virtual machine. Just like I would the rest of my virtual machines.
In Azure. So it's that simple.
That was about three minutes for us to stand up this entire thing.
And we now have another connected service within Azure Arc. Alright,
so having said that,
let's jump back over and finish out this episode by talking about whether we
should invest, evaluate, or revisit the service.
Pretty cool, huh? So now that you've had a chance to see Arc in action,
it's time for the verdict. Should you invest,
evaluate or revisit?
Let's start with a quick list of pros and cons.
The pros - you can manage multiple servers, databases,
and Kubernetes clusters from a variety of sources, all from the Azure console.
You can run Azure data services anywhere, not just in Azure.
You can introduce role based access control and security logs anywhere.
And it's free, for now, at least. And the cons. Well,
it's free. Hey, wait a minute. Why is that a con? Well,
it's not going to be free forever. So that means change and unknowns,
which can be a problem if you're designing a solution at scale.
This is especially true if you're trying to push new unknown costs through
finance. Also, Arc is Azure focused,
so if you're not primarily an Azure shop this may not be the tool for you,
or it may be a reason to explore changing to Azure.
Should you invest, evaluate or revisit? Like any good cook,
it helps to know what you're working with.
Azure Arc is definitely not a one size fits all product.
So I'm going to break down my verdict.
If you're an organization that is primarily a Microsoft shop running in Azure,
then my recommendation is to invest.
Let's say you're involved in three to four different environments, i.e. on prem,
multiple cloud vendors, something like that.
And you have a dedicated ops team that works to push policies and manage the
environment.
Then Arc can be a fantastic time saver and a worthwhile investment.
However, let's just say that you're dipping your toe into the cloud pool,
or you have a very small footprint. Arc might be an evaluate,
and you definitely should evaluate right now. I mean, it's completely free,
right? Finally, if you rarely, if ever,
leave the Azure space or truly have a split infrastructure with security and ops
management in separate entities in Google and Azure, or on prem in Azure,
then I'd suggest revisiting Arc. It may not be for you right now,
but it could be in the future. Of course,
I have to add my terms and conditions at the end.
Every organization is different and every organization's trajectory is
different.
So make sure to take that into account and make sure to dive a little deeper
into Arc.
It is an extremely valuable service that will definitely be expanding and
growing in popularity. So that's it!
Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus and I hope to see you next time on Azure Service
Spotlight.