Introduction

  • 2 minutes

Azure Arc provides a centralized way to manage Windows Server instances, Linux instances, Kubernetes clusters, and connected data sources. It projects non-Azure and/or on-premises resources into Azure Resource Manager, so that hybrid environments can be managed efficiently and consistently.

Contoso, Ltd. is a midsize financial services company in London with a branch office in New York City. Most of the Contoso, Ltd. compute environment runs on-premises on Windows Server.

Contoso's IT director realizes that Contoso has an outdated operational model with limited automation and reliance on dated technology. The Contoso IT Engineering team is exploring Azure capabilities and plans to migrate some workloads to Azure. However, the company plans to continue operating an on-premises environment for some time. So it's important they have the ability to apply Azure policies to on-premises Windows Server workloads, and the ability to review these on-premises Windows Server instances alongside Azure VMs in the Azure portal. It's also important that administrators can use the Azure portal to manage the various distributions of Kubernetes clusters that Contoso uses today.

As Contoso moves to a modern cloud computing environment, it wants to understand how Azure services might help with modernizing the current operational model through automation and virtualization, even though they need to maintain some on-premises resources.

As part of the initial design, the Contoso IT team wants you, as the lead system engineer and server administrator, to evaluate how Azure services can help modernize Contoso's IT infrastructure while meeting business goals.

Learning objectives

After completing this module, you'll be able to:

  • Describe Azure Arc-enabled servers.
  • Describe Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes.
  • Describe Azure Arc-enabled data services.
  • Describe how Azure Arc can integrate with other Azure services.

Prerequisites

To get the best learning experience from this module, you should have knowledge of, and experience with:

  • Personal computer operating systems.
  • Fundamentals of virtualization.
  • Fundamentals of cloud computing.