Azure Arc

Azure has come up with a new suite of services housed under the name Azure arc.

Azure arc is designed to steer this era of hybrid computing where you have a unified control panel that maintains and controls all your azure services across azure data centres and private data centres.

It also has this novel feature that allows you to manage your data service anywhere your data centre is.

There are also two open-source projects that allow developers to build cloud-native distributed applications.

Not just that, the implementation of a new programming model helps makes it seamless for the development of enterprise applications and deployment model.

You can bring azure innovation virtually anywhere. Let us take for instance that I am responsible for the IT operations of an industry and it is my responsibility to deliver the agility the business demands while ensuring the security and compliance of the system. With azure arc, I can manage all of my resources seamlessly from the azure portal, extending management capabilities to my data centre.

I can hook up the datacentre to azure arc and have azure services run on it with same the same level of security you can get in various azure datacentres. I’m also able to view the location of my datacentre on the azure arc portal.

Let’s look at this scenario where the company is rolling out a new risk management application. Let’s see how azure arc changes the game.

From the azure market place, I can provision an Azure SQL DB. and deploy it in my companies datacentre. The good thing is that azure allows me to deploy the same version of Azure SQL DB in my private data centre.

Typically deploying into a virtual machine on-premises is a lengthy process that can take hours but with Azure Arc, the DB can be deployed in seconds in my data centre. And even better, I have access to azures unique security capabilities.

The new data centre can also take advantage of Azure’s security capabilities like Azure’s threat detection and vulnerability assessment which can be enabled on default with a policy.

Azure Arc also allows the making of updates in accordance with my companies policy. So I can specify a custom maintenance window or enable “Automatic patching”  and never have to worry about a single update.

Azure Arc also allows scaling out of private data centres automatically whenever it reaches its CPU limit. Typically provisioning of database and servers to deal with an unexpected spike in demand is very time consuming but Azure Arc understands the capacity available in your data centres enabling you to scale out on-demand.

With PostgresSQL Hyperscale, I can add instances to the power of that application. I can easily scale to 3000 nodes if needed.

In Azure Arc, I can also create a single policy that will encrypt the disk that is running in the database on the clusters across on-premises and Azure.

So I don’t have to worry about the application, the database, where it is running or who is running it. I can rest knowing that the data centre is secure.

Working in a global industry requires me to be able to serve the customer 24/7 worldwide with minimal downtime.

With geolocation in Azure Arc, I can easily replicate from an on-premise location to another or to an Azure data centre or even AWS.  You heard that right!!. You can also replicate in AWS and that is awesome.

Finally, Azure Arc unifies your operations enabling consistency and agility across all of your data centres.

For more insight on Azure Arc’s you can check out this link