Azure Arc Systems Management: Governance and Administration of Multi-cloud and Hybrid IT Estates

This book is for enterprise and solution architects, systems integrators, and anyone managing enterprise-scale, multi-cloud or hybrid IT landscapes. The book examines usage of Azure Arc for governance and systems management with security as an overarching theme. It is not an implementation manual but provides high-level guidance on best practices and links to detailed guidance. It offers insight into the types of problems that Azure Arc can solve, and will help you determine whether it is the right choice for your organization.

Modern enterprise computing is an astonishing luxury land filled with never-before-seen hosting options on commercial clouds as well as advancements in the areas of private cloud and edge computing. The challenge with this plethora of choices is to manage and coordinate large IT estates which may bridge multiple public clouds and private datacenters. Visibility of operations to achieve security, cost control, and efficiency is often difficult to achieve. Data management is another area which is particularly fraught with complexity and risk.

Industry leaders have made serious investments in the design of control plane products to address these gaps with varying approaches and degrees of success. Azure Arc is designed to provide a consolidated view of assets such as databases and Kubernetes installations across major cloud providers, edge locations, and customer-owned datacenters. It facilitates deployment of new infrastructure, patching and upgrades, monitoring, policy, and security controls for assets living on-premises or in competitor clouds as if they were native to Azure. While competitive products exist, at this writing none have the flexibility and reach of Arc to effectively manage very large hybrid estates.

Readers will appreciate the author’s approach of walking through typical enterprise computing scenarios while listing industry- or scenario-specific challenges that are difficult to overcome, and then reinforcing understanding by restating the challenges while explaining how Azure Arc can be utilized to remediate them.

What You Will Learn

• Discover what Azure Arc is, the types of problems it is intended to solve, and how to map your requirements to its capabilities
• Streamline and secure large Arc-enabled Kubernetes deployments via modern GitOps practices
• Use Azure Arc to consolidate management across a broad range of hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems through policy-driven governance
• Apply monitoring and automation to defend systems against security threats that are beyond the ability of manual administration to deflect
• Uncover practical guidance that is written in a way that makes basic precepts approachable to non-technical stakeholders and then branches out into areas that will offer advanced readers new insights and consolidate a broad topic into a usable direction

Ramona Maxwell is an experienced Enterprise Solution Architect who has worked with clients across a broad spectrum of the Fortune 100 such as utilities, finance, and healthcare organizations. She is certified by Microsoft as an Azure Solutions Architect Expert and is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT), Associate as well as a 2020 graduate of VMware’s Platform Acceleration Lab training for application architects. She has expertise in container technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker and extensive experience extending line-of-business systems across multiple technology stacks. Ramona is an occasional presenter at industry events on enterprise computing strategies and techniques.