Skip to main content

Running Azure on your laptop– Part 1–What is Azure Arc?

Before I dive into the details on how to get Azure Arc up and running on your laptop, it would be a good idea to start with a short introduction.

Therefore we first have to dive in how Azure works. The hearth of the Azure ecosystem is the Azure control plane. This control plane manages all the resources you can find in Azure. It helps you to inventorize, organize and govern all resources and multiple tools exist that can help you to interact with it (think ARM templates, Bicep, Terraform, Pulumi, …)

You probably know this control plane better as the Azure Resource manager. It controls and manage all the Azure resources which can be as big as a Kubernetes cluster and as small as a static ip address. These resources run inside an Azure region, one of the datacenters that Microsoft has all around the world.

So where does Azure Arc fits into this picture?

If we bring Azure Arc into the picture, we can bring resources that are not running on Azure to the Azure control plane and by doing that we can start using all services on top of the Azure Resource manager to secure, monitor, protect, … these resources. These resources can be running in your own datacenter or even at one of the other cloud providers!

Today, Azure Arc allows you to manage the following resource types hosted outside of Azure:

  • Servers - both physical and virtual machines running Windows or Linux.
  • Kubernetes clusters - supporting multiple Kubernetes distributions.
  • Azure data services - Azure SQL Managed Instance and PostgreSQL Hyperscale services.
  • SQL Server - enroll instances from any location with SQL Server on Azure Arc-enabled servers.

I think this really is a game changer as it allows you to start using all the knowledge, experience and tooling you’ve build up on Azure outside the Microsoft datacenters.

The future looks bright…

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t
Read more

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities.  DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Color B
Read more