3 years ago

Category: Software, Business, Database, Security, Data, Microsoft, Kubernetes, Infrastructure

But while hybrid cloud might be nearly ubiquitous, what people are doing with it varies, which is why Microsoft has an increasingly wide range of hybrid cloud products, from Azure Stack Hub for running on cloud-like hardware to Azure Stack Edge that’s small enough to put in a backpack or install on a factory production line. Azure Arc makes Azure Resource Manager templates the control plane for managing and applying governance to all your infrastructure — VMs, Kubernetes or databases, on Azure, on your own hardware and in other clouds — in a consistent way, using GitOps and brings a subset of Azure services to that infrastructure (starting with database services).

Arc data services rely on the resource provider that runs in Azure and the Arc data controller; that’s a set of Kubernetes pods deployed on your Kubernetes cluster (in any location) that provide both the controller service or run the database services and an API, plus Kibana and Grafana dashboards for visualization of monitoring data locally (although you can also choose to export it and view it in the Azure portal).

The difference between Arc-enabled SQL Server and Arc data services isn’t just the wider choice of databases; it’s that with data services, Azure handles the updates, deployment, backup/restore, monitoring, security and elastic scaling, so just like in the cloud you get an evergreen database service that’s always up to date and in support.

Arc data services and AKS on Azure Stack HCI are priced as pay-as-you-go cloud services (for data services that will be based on the numbers of cores the database instances are consuming).