Microsoft Azure has a significant market share in the public cloud market including the multi-cloud setup. Azure has stepped up its efforts to increase its contribution in the multi-cloud market with the release of its service Azure Arc.

A recent report published by Flexera recently showed the fastest growing trend in the cloud domain: multi-cloud. It clearly reflects that most organizations are moving towards a multi-cloud setup instead of depending on a single cloud provider. There are many reasons for such a trend. Customer organizations do not want to be locked in with a single provider, they need to reduce the risk of cloud service outage, and want to expand their service footprint in multiple geographic regions.

Link: https://www.flexera.com/blog/cloud/cloud-computing-trends-2022-state-of-the-cloud-report/

Challenges for Azure Arc

The biggest challenge that multi-cloud users face is about having a single view of everything that’s happening in their solution. Because the solution and its components are deployed on platforms offered by different providers, this is a difficult task to achieve.

Securing the entire solution from a centralized control plane is another huge concern. There are many potential loose ends in a solution that can be attacked by cybercriminals. These include application security, data security, network security, session security, and more.

The next big ticket on the list is about running cloud-native applications uniformly on multiple platforms with different features. There should not be a need to keep making changes in the deployment model to suit each new platform’s requirements.

Creating a data and evidence-based solution support mechanism is also a big challenge. Connectivity, format, and encoding are some of the differences in accessing the data generated on different platforms.

Assessing and enforcing organizational policies and standards on the solution is another difficulty in a multi-cloud architecture. Irrespective of the platform and component, organizations need their brand identity imprinted on them uniformly.

What is Azure Arc?

Azure Arc is a service that enables you to project all on-premises, Azure-based, and non-Azure-based resources on the Azure Resource Manager (ARM). ARM provides an abstraction layer for managing the resources associated with an Azure account. It allows administrators to deploy, manage, and monitor resources on the Azure cloud. On multi-cloud, the resources are disparate, and Azure Arc helps in managing them on other cloud platforms, like AWS, GCP, and private cloud.

Azure Arc primarily uses 2 components to manage all the resources: Fabric Controller (FC) and Azure Resource Manager (ARM).

Use Cases for Azure Arc

There are various ways in which Azure Arc can be used by organizations opting for multi-cloud architectures.

Azure Arc for Servers

Virtual machines running on other platforms, such as on-premises or other cloud providers, need to be registered on the ARM via Azure Arc. This is achievable irrespective of the VPN or proxy networks protecting the VMs. The VMs need to run an agent, called Connected Machines. The agent connects with the Fabric Controller and communicates with the ARM. These VMs are considered under the category of “compute resources” on the ARM.

Since Azure Arc supports on-premises infrastructure as well, VMs running on much older physical servers can also make use of the Connected Machines agent for monitoring purposes. VMs that are not continuously connected to the internet can also be managed and monitored by Azure Arc.

VMs of all makes are supported by Azure Arc, such as Linux, Windows, and CNCF-approved OS.

Azure Arc for Data

Data services on Azure Arc make use of Azure SQL and PostgreSQL Hyperscale for running data workloads and providing database-as-a-service. The database service provides high availability and elastic scaling without application downtime. It follows a unified management technique for making database services available for environments that are not always connected to Azure.

While the users deploy their application on the cloud, they may keep their database on their existing and more trusted on-premises infrastructure using Azure Arc to manage the deployment model seamlessly. Irrespective of the networks and firewalls, Azure Arc can transparently manage the entire setup, leading to high customer satisfaction.

Azure Arc for DevOps

Kubernetes is the key to modern deployment models that helps to manage containerized workloads. It has various deployment services, such as the bare metal clusters for the on-premises infrastructure, AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine), EKS (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service), and more.

With the help of Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes, all Kubernetes clusters can be connected, and management capabilities can be extended to Azure Monitor and Azure Policy.

While AKS is a managed Kubernetes service offered by Azure, the same is not true for Azure Arc. In the case of Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes needs to be managed entirely by the user. Azure Arc brings in higher flexibility for managing the containerized workloads across the multi-cloud deployments, helps implement uniform security and governance policies, and allows better monitoring options. At the same time, it also adds management overheads in terms of effort and cost for the users.

Our thoughts about Azure Arc

Azure Arc is a major gamechanger in the world of multi-cloud. Organizations stuck with on-premises infrastructure, older Linux VMs, older databases, and other deployment components have Azure Arc as a means to quickly move on to modernized services. Arc helps simplify complex and distributed systems across various environments like on-premises, multi-cloud, and on edge.

Azure Arc is simple to adopt and covers a wide variety of environments and infrastructure making it a lucrative option for the organizations to quickly get on to it. We recommend it wholeheartedly.