Microsoft Azure, just like its competitors, has launched a number of tools in recent years that allow organisations to use a single platform to manage their virtual machines and containers across clouds and in their own data centres. For Microsoft, the main tool for managing these is Azure Arc. Given the focus on IT professionals, it’s no surprise that Microsoft used its Ignite conference to highlight a number of new features in Arc and its overall multi-cloud line up.
“Customers just have thousands and thousands of apps, databases, servers they run in different locations,” Roanne Sones, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Azure Edge and Platform. “Regulation is constantly evolving and growing. Security attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated — and their ability to actually manage that in any sort of a consistent way, given just how sprawled across their environment it is, it’s just really hard. So they’re pretty overwhelmed. At the same time, they look at the cloud and they want to hitch themselves to that innovation wagon and it’s hard for them because there are just going to be workloads that never move to the cloud. So how do they take some of the things that they’ve sampled in the cloud, but be able to actually run it wherever they need to run it, however they need to run it?”
In Sones opinion, the first step is to find a consistent way to manage all of that. With the increasing complexity and depth to modern framework, that’s a bit of a journey, but at Ignite, Microsoft is showing off a few new integrations that will make this easier. These include Azure Stack HCI, VMware vSphere and Azure Policy Guest Configuration. Azure Stack HCI (HCI stands for “hyper-converged infrastructure”), for example, is now Arc-enabled by default, while vSphere users now get self-service VM control from Azure to manage VMs based on vSphere templates. Furthermore, Azure Arc allows machine learning inferencing after a previous update enabled users to train and build models, in Arc-enabled settings.
“Now you have full consistency between cloud and edge,” Sones said. “You don’t have to move your data if you don’t want to move your data. Previously, you had to move your data on-prem. In the cloud, you can do all your Arc-enabled capabilities there — and then bring it back. Now we’ve got that new full lifecycle.”
As of this moment in time, most of Microsoft’s customers are using these AI capabilities in the context of proof of concepts, but not necessarily in production. The endeavour takes time, after all, but Sones says she’s already seeing some customers who are starting to put their models into production in multi-cloud environments. All on this and some other relate features of Microsoft Azure can be seen at TechCrunch.
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