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Microsoft continues to bring Azure-based managed services to Azure Arc, the hybrid and multi-cloud platform. At BUILD 2021, held last week, the company announced the availability of Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities on Azure Arc in preview.

Bridge

Azure Arc is Microsofts hybrid and multi-cloud platform that seamlessly extends the capabilities of Azure public cloud to on-prem data centers, edge locations, and any public cloud. Customers with investments in Azure can centrally manage and govern infrastructure running in diverse environments.

With Azure Arc, Microsoft extended the core resource management capabilities of Azure to support external resources like Linux and Windows servers, Kubernetes clusters, SQL Server instances, PostgreSQL Hyperscale servers and more.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM), the control plane responsible for provisioning and managing cloud-based services such as Azure VMs and Azure SQL Database, is expanding its capabilities to support non-Azure resources running outside of the public cloud.

Azure Arc acts as the glue connecting the external resources to Azure Resource Manager.

At the heart of Azure Arc is Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration engine powering the modern infrastructure. Microsoft relies on Kubernetes to provide a consistent environment to run its hybrid and multi-cloud services.

It doesnt matter if the Kubernetes cluster runs on Amazon EC2 or Google Compute Engine or a fleet of vSphere VMs. Microsoft can push an agent and start running its managed services. The Azure engineering team is squarely focused on porting some of its best-managed services to Kubernetes without worrying about the underlying compute infrastructure.

Kubernetes as the Foundation for Azure Arc

Microsoft is one of the first companies to exploit Kubernetes as the foundation for its hybrid and multi-cloud strategy. In just two years, it ported a dozen managed services to Kubernetes, branding them as Arc-enabled services.

Though Anthos, the closest competitor to Azure Arc, was launched much before, Google has been slow in bringing cloud-based managed services to its hybrid platform. In contrast, Microsoft has been aggressive in adding services to Azure Arc.

An enterprise needs a reliable infrastructure to run the system of record and the system of engagement. The system of record handles the data management through relational databases, while the system of engagement acts as the interface to the data. More recently, enterprises have started to invest in the system of intelligence, which provides predictive analytics and machine learning-based services.

Azure Arc services

Azure Arc is the only hybrid and multi-cloud platform that can run all three layers - the system of record, the system of intelligence and the system of engagement.

Microsoft has a history of managing the enterprises system of record through SQL Server and Azure SQL DB.

Through Azure Arc, Microsoft brought SQL Managed Instance and PostgreSQL Hyperscale to hybrid and multi-cloud environments. These two flavors of databases cover a broad range of use cases and scenarios that enable customers to run modern applications with the ease of consuming DB as a Service (DBaaS) offerings.

Azure Arc Enabled Data Services become the system of record for modern enterprises.

With Azure Arc Enabled Machine Learning, Microsoft brought Azure ML to Arc. Customers can run the MLOps pipeline within their environment by ingesting data from on-prem and cloud data sources, running training jobs, and even hosting the models for inference.

Customers can run their ML training on any Kubernetes target cluster in the Azure cloud, Google Cloud, AWS, edge devices, and on-prem through Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes. With a few clicks, they can enable the Azure Machine Learning agent to run on any open source Kubernetes cluster that Azure Arc supports.

Azure Arc Enabled Machine Learning service delivers the system of intelligence.

At BUILD 2021, Microsoft announced the availability of application services on Azure Arc. With this integration, customers can run App Service, Functions, and Logic Apps on any Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes cluster.

Interestingly, customers can run different classes of applications ranging from web frontends, API services, serverless applications, and event-driven applications.

An application deployed on Azure Arc can talk to the database hosted on Arc-enabled Data Services while tapping into the machine learning models for predictions without ever leaving the enterprise data center.

Azure Arc App service delivers the system of engagement to the end-users.

Microsoft is moving fast with Azure Arc by porting key managed services to the hybrid and multi-cloud platform.

Every Arc-enabled service running on Kubernetes takes advantage of automation, centralized logging, GitOps-based configuration, and role-based access control and security. Customers can leverage centralized Azure tools and frameworks to manage the distributed infrastructure and platforms.

Azure Arc builds a solid bridge between Microsofts public cloud and competitors cloud platforms. Imagine running SQL Managed Instance as a part of Arc enabled data services on Amazon EKS while training a machine learning model through Arc enabled ML on Google Kubernetes Engine.

With the industry best practices baked into Azure Arc, customers focus only on the workloads and applications.

Azure Arc is one of the best moves from Microsoft, helping the company become the leader in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud offerings.

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Azure Arc - Bringing The Best Of The Public Cloud To Hybrid And Multi-Cloud Environments - Forbes