Introduction
Azure Arc promises to bridge the gap between on-premises and cloud environments by providing consistent security, observability, and governance of the Azure platform and its services. In this module, you'll learn how you can benefit from these capabilities.
Let's consider a hypothetical customer scenario. Contoso is a medium-sized financial services company with its headquarters in London, England, and offices all around the world. It’s currently operating almost entirely on-premises, with the compute environment consisting of a mix of physical and virtual servers, running a range of Windows Server versions and Linux distributions. That diversity, along with the corresponding siloed operational model and lack of tools that would facilitate a consistent, unified management is the primary challenge that Contoso's IT team is currently facing. In addition, Contoso's IT team is exploring the option of migrating to the cloud some of its on-premises server workloads running on legacy infrastructure, which is reaching end of life. Contoso is considering several different cloud providers with the possibility of the multicloud strategy. The primary concern of the Contoso's Chief Information Officer (CIO) is that such strategy might further exacerbate operational complexity and management overhead that Contoso's IT is trying to minimize.
Contoso's CIO wants to identify technologies that promise to bridge the gap between the administrative model of on-premises and multicloud services regardless of the server operating system and the hardware or virtualization platform. While attending the most recent Ignite event, the CIO learned about the hybrid capabilities of Azure Arc and asked you, the IT Engineering team lead, with evaluating the extent to which Azure Arc-enabled servers can help with building a consistent, unified management model.
Learning objectives
After completing this module, you'll be able to:
- Describe the characteristics of Azure Arc-enabled servers and the Connected Machine agent.
- Describe the capabilities, benefits, and use cases of Azure Arc-enabled servers for security, monitoring, and governance.
Prerequisites
For the best learning experience from this module, you should have knowledge of and experience with the following:
- Basic concepts of cloud technologies
- Basic characteristics of Azure services
- Core compute, storage, networking, and virtualization technologies
- Basic Windows Server and Linux administration tasks