Ignite 2019: Azure Arc to extend services to AWS and other third-party services

Microsoft announced today an important new milestone in its strategy to support hybrid clouds for its customers that working with multiple cloud vendors. At its Ignite conference in Orlando this morning, the company launched the preview of Azure Arc, a new set of technologies that will extend Azure management of Windows and Linux servers on any infrastructure.

“Hundreds of millions of Azure resources are organized, governed and secured daily by customers using Azure management. Azure Arc extends these proven Azure management capabilities to Linux and Windows servers, as well as Kubernetes clusters on any infrastructure across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge,” explained Julia White, CVP of Azure. “Customers can now have a consistent and unified approach to managing their different environments using robust, established capabilities such as Azure Resource Manager, Azure Shell, Azure Portal, API, and Azure Policy.”

The fact that Azure Arc will allow customers to enable Azure data services on any infrastructure should be a pretty big deal, especially when you take into account the ability to use Azure capabilities to manage on-premises infrastuctrures. The Azure Arc for management of Windows and Linux servers on any infrastructure is available in preview starting today, along with the Azure Arc for management of Kubernetes clusters.