Introduction
Imagine that you're a systems engineer for Contoso, a medium-size financial services company with headquarters in London and offices in New York and San Francisco. Contoso's computing environment is hosted in its on-premises datacenters. Most Contoso workloads are fully containerized on Kubernetes, running on a third-party virtualization platform.
Despite its modernized environment, Contoso faces challenges imposed by capacity and agility constraints inherent in on-premises infrastructures. It's also becoming harder to consistently manage and deploy applications to a continually growing number of Kubernetes clusters.
To address these capacity and agility challenges, IT management has decided to migrate many of Contoso's containerized workloads to the cloud. Contoso wants to use multiple cloud providers to avoid single-vendor dependency, but has chosen Azure as its main deployment target.
Your engineering team is tasked with exploring and evaluating Azure Arc capabilities for Kubernetes-based workloads. You must determine how Contoso can benefit from the Azure Arc cloud-to-edge management model and pursue a multivendor strategy while maintaining some on-premises containerized workloads.
In this module, you learn how Azure Arc extends the Azure platform so that applications and services have the flexibility to run across datacenters, at the edge, and in multicloud environments. You’ll learn how Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes lets companies like Contoso manage all of their Kubernetes resources in a single control plane, and how it provides a consistent development and operation experience to run cloud-native apps anywhere and on any Kubernetes platform. You can then implement these capabilities at Contoso to help optimize and simplify its operations.
Learning objectives
After you complete this module, you know how to:
- Describe Kubernetes, Azure Arc, and Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes.
- Understand how to enhance Kubernetes environments by connecting Kubernetes clusters to Azure Arc.
- Understand how to deploy applications to Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters by using GitOps to manage configurations.
- Learn about Azure services that can be deployed to Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters.
- Understand how to use Azure Policy and Azure Monitor with Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes.
Prerequisites
For the best learning experience from this module, you need basic understanding and familiarity with:
- Containerization and Kubernetes architecture
- Basic understanding of managing Kubernetes clusters
- Azure portal and Azure CLI
- Azure Monitor and Azure Policy
- GitOps principles and processes