Azure Arc: The Big Picture

Notes & illustrations from the Pluralsight course Azure Arc: The Big Picture and other online resources: 

With Cloud and especially Edge computing, our data and compute estate is more distributed than ever before 

Azure Arc extends resources that are outside of Azure to Azure and brings services that were previously only available in Azure to any infrastructure 

Azure Arc Service offerings:

1. Azure Arc-enabled Servers
2. Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server
3. Azure Arc-enabled Data Services
4. Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes
5. Azure Arc-enabled Machine Learning

The Azure Arc Jumpstart project provides a “zero to hero” experience

With Azure Arc, pretty much all data to be consumed and used by Azure Monitor will be stored in an Azure Log Analytics workspace. 

Many of the features require an Azure Automation account, which is kind of like a service account for automation tests within Azure, unlike a service principal that authenticates from the outside to perform some of the service offerings tasks. To do so, this Automation account will be linked to the Log Analytics workspace.

Azure Lighthouse allows a granular management of permissions for service providers which can also be applied to Arc resources

Azure Arc-enabled Servers and Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server extend your own deployments to Azure

Azure Arc-enabled Data Services and Azure Arc-enabled Machine Learning bring services like Azure Machine Learning or a SQL Managed Instance to your own Kubernetes cluster 

Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters can be used as the target for Azure services while being centrally managed at the same time.

Azure Stack HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure, software-defined, unified system that combines all the disparate and siloed elements of a traditional datacenter: secure storage, compute, network, and management) is included in your existing Azure subscription. It integrates with Azure Resource Manager and the Azure portal through Azure Arc to facilitate resource management at a global level.