by Scott Muniz | Sep 22, 2020 | Azure, Technology, Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Azure Monitor for containers has been generally available for a while now, providing comprehensive viability to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters and the applications deployed in it. Did you know this can be applied on Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters as well?!
Monitor this, monitor that
As Kubernetes becomes more and more the de-facto container orchestration platform out there, the need for an organization’s operations maturity around it is facing a lot of challenges.
Now, it’s even if the current challenges are not enough, Kubernetes deployments sprawling across multiple cloud providers and on-premises is adding another dimension to these challenges.
Specifically, when you have different ways and interfaces to monitor those clusters and the applications deployed on top of it.
1st party experience
If you are an AKS user, you might already be leveraging the Azure Monitor for containers integrated experience and if not, well, you should.
With this integration, you are getting all the Kubernetes-related performance metrics, telemetry, and metadata you need. Not just on the cluster-level, but also the relevant information on the applications deployed on the cluster as you can see in the below figure.
Bring “outsiders” to the party
Having AKS integrate with Azure Monitor for containers, a 1st party Azure product is a given and mandatory but now that we have Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters projected in Azure, wouldn’t make sense to have the same integration for these clusters as well?! Of course so!
By onboarding the Kubernetes clusters outside of Azure using Arc and deploy the Operations Management Suite Agent in the cluster, we are able to connect the clusters to an Azure Log Analytics workspace, same as we are doing for AKS and as a result, have the same monitoring experience for outside Kubernetes clusters.
As you can from the below figure, we are getting the same performance metrics, both on the cluster and the application-level, metadata and all the telemetry one might need but now, it is a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster we are looking at – that’s dope!
Get Started Today
In this post, we briefly touched on Azure Monitor for containers integration with Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters and showed how you can have a unified monitoring experience for both AKS clusters and the Kubernetes clusters deployed outside of Azure.
To get started, visit the Azure Arc Jumpstart GitHub repository, where you can find more than 30 Azure Arc deployment guides and automation, including how to onboard your Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters and start using Azure Monitor for containers with it. I addition, visit the official Azure Arc documentation page where you can find more information.
Also, check out these additional great Azure Arc blog posts!
by Scott Muniz | Sep 22, 2020 | Azure, Technology, Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
There is a new kid on the block, his name is “Azure Arc” and he wants people to play with it. This is why we create the Azure Arc Jumpstart project and GitHub Repository.
The goal of the repo is for you to have a working Azure Arc demo environment spun up in no-time so you can focus on playing, demoing, upskilling yourself and your team and see the core values of Azure Arc.
Disclaimer: The intention of this repo is to focus on the core Azure Arc capabilities, deployment scenarios, use-cases and ease of use. It does not focus on Azure best-practices or the other tech and OSS projects being leveraged in the guides and code.
The Why – Design Principles
The repository was created with 3 main design principles in mind:
- Provide a “zero to hero” Azure Arc scenarios for multiple environments, cloud platforms and deployment types using as much automation as possible.
- Create a ”Supermarket” experience by being able to take “off the shelf” scenarios and implement (eat) them.
- Meeting Azure Arc customers and users where they are.
The How – Using & Implementing
Our goal with the repository is for you to be self-sufficient and for us to provide you with the right set of instructions and automation, no matter which platform you want to use.
The structure of the repo is aligned with the Azure Arc pillars; Servers, Kubernetes and Data Services and will have future Arc-related content as well. As you may have already noticed, the scenarios in the repo are split into two categories – Bootstrapping and Day-2.
So first, you will bootstrap and environment and then, you can move on to the Day-2 stuff. For example, spin-up an AWS EC2 instance, onboard it as an Azure Arc enabled Server and then apply tags, Azure Policies followed by hooking it to Azure Security Center or Azure Sentinel.
Another example could be provisioning a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster, onboard it to Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes and then start creating GitOps Configurations and connect it to Azure Monitor for Containers.
So, as you can see, there is something for everyone with tons more scenarios in the repo. You even don’t have to have AWS or GCP account, we have included guides on how to deploy environments using tools like Hashicorp Vagrant or using a VMware vSphere environment you can leverage.
Get Started Today!
It’s very easy to get going with the repo and the scenarios. As you will notice, we also incl. Very detailed prerequisites section in each guide, again, so you will have everything you need to become Azure Arc Master Ninja.
Hop on to https://aka.ms/AzureArcJumpstart and start your Arc-journey 
!
In addition, check out these additional great Azure Arc blog posts!
by Scott Muniz | Sep 22, 2020 | Azure, Technology, Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
This blog post is co-authored by @Nikhil_Jethava and @LauraNicolas
Modern organizations often manage diverse and complex IT infrastructures that frequently sprawl to multi-cloud environments.
Many enterprises have chosen pattern or vendor specific tools causing a ruptured management experience and an inconsistent approach to their operations. This problem is heightened with the pressure to innovate and deliver applications faster to the market, as well with the explosion of cloud native technologies and practices. The absence of single view and consistent tooling complicates the management for customer and partners alike.
Azure is focused on delivering innovation anywhere with a wide offering of hybrid services that meet customers and partners requirements as their environments become more complex. When Azure Lighthouse was introduced, it was another major step to address these challenges as it uncovered new possibilities for cross tenant management in the Azure platform with greater scale, visibility, and accuracy, turning the Azure Portal into a single control plane. With the addition of Azure Arc these cloud operations and practices can be extended to every workload and infrastructure, regardless of what it’s running or where is running.
Build a single view to manage across tenants.
Azure Lighthouse enables cross and multi-tenant management bringing greater scale and visibility into operations. The secret sauce behind Azure Lighthouse is the Azure Delegated Resource Management capability that logically projects resources from one tenant onto another and unlocks cross-tenant management with granular role based access and eliminates the need to do context switching.
Although Azure Lighthouse will work on any multitenant scenario, like customers that may have multiple Azure AD tenants (e.g. multiple subsidiaries or geographies in separate tenants) and it is very valuable for partners, specially Managed Service Providers (MSPs) as they can realize efficiencies using Azure’s operations and management tools for multiple customers.
To illustrate this scenario, let’s take a look at Contoso who is responsible for the IT operations of three separate entities: Microsoft, Fabrikam and Fourth Coffee, each of them running Azure workloads on dedicated tenants. Azure Lighthouse enables Contoso to centrally manage resource inventories, access and identity, governance, monitoring and security across all the other three tenants. By aggregating all this data in a single view, Contoso can achieve consistency, security, and compliance for all the tenants while achieving greater operational efficiencies and building new offerings.
Governance and Compliance Management
With Azure Policy, Contoso can create, edit and apply policy definitions within the delegated subscriptions, they can also get a compliance snapshot that ensures that managed resources are compliant with corporate or regulatory standards from all three tenants having a full picture of the compliance status. Also, if Contoso develops new policies their intellectual property will be protected by using Azure Lighthouse as they can be centrally managed from their own central tenant.
The Azure Policy portal has been enhanced so you can select multiple scopes that will include a list of managed tenants and subscriptions:
Inventory Tracking and Management
Contoso has now the ability to develop multitenant queries using Azure Resource Graph to filter resources, leverage tags or track changes. The tenant ID can be returned in the query results, so the subscription and delegated tenant can be identified.
Monitoring and Alerting
Contoso can also get monitoring and security alerts across all of the tenant’s subscriptions, run multitenant queries using KQL and set up dashboards that provides valuable insights on the managed environments. There is no need to store logs from different entities into a shared log analytics workspace, Microsoft, Fabrikam and Fourth Coffee can keep their logs on a dedicated workspace in their subscription, while Contoso gets delegated access to them and get insights from all tenants. Once again Contoso can choose the scope they want to work with in the portal.
Security and Compliance
Contoso can offer managed security services by centrally protecting Azure resources with Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel they can provide proactive/reactive security best practices. Azure Security Center has cross-tenant visibility to manage security posture centrally and take actions on recommendations, detect threats, and harden resources.
Azure Sentinel when working with Lighthouse, can track incidents and attacks across tenants as well as define cross-tenant KQL queries.
Process Automation and Configuration Management
Azure Automation can be set up at scale, including runbook automation, desired state configuration and update management. Contoso can automate processes running custom scripts on the managed tenants while having their IP protected.
Resource Deployment at Scale
Lighthouse allows Contoso to not only operate but also deploy and configure Azure services on the managed tenants’ subscriptions. Taking care of their networking, storage, virtual machines, container environments and PaaS services. The management of operational tasks of those resources like backup or disaster recovery are very often handed off to specialists like Contoso that can centrally manage backup, restore and replication as well.
Extend Azure management across your environments.
Very often, enterprises have resources on-premises or on other clouds and they need to extend operations to those hybrid and distributed states. Having built processes and offerings using Azure Services and Lighthouse it would be very powerful if those could be stretched to run across on-premises, other clouds, or the edge.
With Azure Arc your on-premises and other clouds deployments become an Azure Resource Manager entity and as such, servers, Kubernetes clusters or data services can be treated as first-class citizens of Azure. As any other ARM resource, they can be organized into resource groups and subscriptions, use tags, policies, assign RBAC and you can even leverage Azure Arc to onboard other services such as Azure Monitoring, Azure Security Center, Azure Sentinel or Azure Automation.
Let’s revisit the Contoso scenario; Microsoft, Fabrikam and Fourth Coffee all have workloads on their on-premises datacenters or in other clouds. With Azure Arc Contoso can not only understand and organize the breadth of operations, but also extend and grow services and offerings provided in Azure into every corner of the portfolio. Using Azure hybrid management services with Azure Arc allows Contoso to adopt cloud-native practices everywhere and Lighthouse will provide the multitenancy required to have a single view into operations.
Governance and Compliance
Azure Policies can now be assigned to Azure Arc enabled servers and Kubernetes to entirely manage governance and guarantee corporate compliance. An initiative like the one shown here ‘Enable Azure Monitor for VMs’ will group not only Azure VMs but also Azure Arc enabled servers both Linux and Windows machines having a full compliance snapshot.
Inventory Management
Multitenant queries with Azure Resource Graph, can now also include Azure Arc enabled resources with filtering, using tags or tracking changes.
Hybrid Services Onboarding at Scale
Contoso can automate the deployment of agents and onboard Arc enabled resources into Azure Monitoring, Azure Automation, Azure Security Center or Azure Sentinel either by using Azure Polices or Azure Arc’s extension management capabilities. The extension management feature for Azure Arc enabled servers provide the same post-deployment configuration and automation tasks that you have for Azure VMs.
Contoso can also leverage policies to guarantee that all resources are properly onboarded into services like Azure Monitor by setting up remediation tasks that use the extension management feature, it will fix automatically any non-compliant resources.
Access Management
Auditability provided by Lighthouse is kept as Azure Arc supports RBAC and the Azure activity log will keep track of actions.
Application and Data Management at Scale
Contoso can use configuration as code and uniformly govern and deploy containerized application using GitOps-based configurations across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge. Contoso can link a cluster to a Git repo that becomes the single source of truth for container deployments and applications, Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes will make sure there is no drift between Git and what is running in the cluster.
Azure Arc enabled data services allows Contoso to run Azure data services like Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure Database for PostreSQL Hyperscale on any Kubernetes cluster with unified management and familiar tools.
With Azure Arc and Azure Lighthouse, Contoso is empowered to create cloud native management operations with no location boundaries.
Get Started
On this blog post we touched on a set of scenarios that are possible by combining Azure Arc with Azure Lighthouse and that will empower you to build reliable and at scale operations for hybrid and multi cloud environments with cross-tenant capabilities. To get started with Azure Lighthouse check out these links:
To get started with Azure Arc visit these links:
by Scott Muniz | Sep 22, 2020 | Azure, Technology, Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
These days, it seems like Kubernetes is one of the most popular conversation topics in the world of Cloud and modern applications. The question is not if your organization uses Kubernetes, it is when the organization will use it.
This post will focus on the need for standardization and not if Kubernetes is meeting your business and technical requirements or not. So now we established the assumption that you already use it, let’s talk about a couple of challenges.
Challenges #1 – Sprawling
If you are in the process of modernizing your applications and adopting cloud-native design patterns, you know, like “next-gen” scalability, availability, security, etc. you probably have some notion of why Kubernetes. But the challenge, in this case, is the Kubernetes cluster sprawl that is about to hit you.
Rather you are building it yourself on-premises, using the gazillion Kubernetes flavors out there, installing on bare-metal or deploying one of the managed Kubernetes offerings the cloud providers has to offer, the problem remains, and all of a sudden you are in the business of managing Kubernetes clusters, well, all over the place. I like to call this “my fleet is out of control” :)
Challenge #2 – “I am drifting away…”
You got your clusters, good for you! But how do you keep all these clusters configured the way you left it?! Don’t you want them to be all meet your configuration baseline?! You do!
It’s not just your clusters that matter because after all, the applications are what drives the business!
Looking at both situations, you can see a recurring theme. This is really about making sure no configuration, rather on the cluster and/or the applications deployed on it are drifting away. You want this because otherwise, you might be facing an outdated application or a cluster that is not meeting for example your security needs.
Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes + GitOps == Wining
Now that we addressed these couple of challenges, we can talk a solution – enters Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes with GitOps configurations.
By extending or “stretching” the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) control plane, we are able to project your Kubernetes clusters which are deployed OUTSIDE of Azure as 1st class citizens inside Azure next to existing resources, for example, as you can see in the figure below, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters reside next to Azure Arc ones.
By doing so, you get a single interface to rule them all which is the start of the solution to challenge #1 – the sprawl of clusters.
Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters alongside AKS clusters
Projecting the clusters is the fundamental building block and now you apply GitOps Configurations for these clusters. Azure Arc with Kubernetes and GitOps is not scary as one might think, the concept and the flow are very straight forward.
Generally speaking, GitOps with Kubernetes is about deploying your applications based on Git repository which represents the “source of truth” or the baseline for this app deployment.
It relays on a Kubernetes Operator, which Is the Flux Operator in the Azure Arc Kubernetes case to “listen” if changes are being made on the baseline, meaning the repo. If such changes occur, the operator will initiate a rolling update Kubernetes deployment, deploying the new Pods and terminating the old one.
This can be done against a standard Kubernetes YAML manifest or a Helm charts release, using also the Help Operator with conjunction to the Flux one (which also gets deployed automatically).
Application deployment GitOps flow with Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes
- Existing Kubernetes clusters are already deployed
- Azure Arc Kubernetes connected cluster is created
- The user creates Azure Arc Kubernetes cluster GitOps Configuration
- The Flux Operator (and optionally the Helm Operator) is deployed on the cluster and starts” listening” to the git repository with the user’s application code
- The Flux operator initiates the user’s application deployment on the cluster, representing the current desired state
- User is updating the application (creating a new app version) and merge changes to the repository
- Flux pick up a change to the Git repository
- Flux operator initiates a new user’s application version deployment on the cluster while removing old version application pods, resulting in a new Desired State
Cluster-level Configuration vs. Namespace-level Configuration
Cluster-level Configuration
With Cluster-level GitOps Configuration, the goal is to have a baseline for the “horizontal components” or “management components” deployed on your Kubernetes cluster which will then be used by your applications. Good examples are Ingress Controller, Service Meshes, Security products, Monitoring solutions, etc. Having such deployments as part of your GitOps Configuration will assure your cluster is meeting the cluster baseline standards.
Namespace-level Configuration
With Namespace-level GitOps Configuration, the goal is to have the Kubernetes resources deployed only in the namespace selected. The most obvious use-case here is simply your application and it’s respective pods, services, ingress routes, etc. Having such deployments as part of your GitOps Configuration will assure your applications are meeting the Kubernetes applications baseline standards.
Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes GitOps Configurations
So, as you can see, by having the same GitOps Configurations for all your Kubernetes clusters, managed by Azure Arc you are solving challenge #2 and able to govern a potential cluster and application config and versioning drifts.
Get Started Today!
In this post we briefly touched on the power of using Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes alongside its native GitOps Configurations capabilities. Having all your Kubernetes clusters projected as Azure resources and have the same GitOps Configurations for all of them will allow you to gain much better control for both fleet management and deployment baselines as well as drift avoidance.
To get started, visit the Azure Arc Jumpstart GitHub repository, where you can find more than 30 Azure Arc deployment guides and automation, including how to deploy end-to-end GitOps flows against your Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters as well as visit the official Azure Arc documentation page.
In addition, check out these additional great Azure Arc blog posts!
by Scott Muniz | Sep 22, 2020 | Azure, Technology, Uncategorized
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We are excited to announce several updates to Azure Migrate’s assessment and migration capabilities. Cloud migration can be a complex project, which is why Microsoft is committed to advancing its migration services to support all your migration needs through expanded scenarios and capabilities. Azure Migrate is Microsoft’s central service for datacenter migration. It features a central hub of migration tools to discover, assess, and migrate your datacenter to the cloud. The service is free to use with your Azure subscription, accessible through the Azure portal.
First, begin your migration project by performing a datacenter discovery to plan the migration and mitigate risks. Azure Migrate helps you discover servers, inventory the applications running on them, and identify dependencies between servers. The discovery process helps you identify and group the workloads to be migrated and plan your migration waves. Server discovery is completely agentless and can discover servers running on any cloud including servers that are virtualized on VMware or Hyper-V, physical machines, or virtual machines running in other public clouds. For VMware virtual machines, Azure Migrate can perform agentless application discovery and dependency mapping at scale, with a single Azure Migrate appliance now capable of analyzing dependencies for up to 1000 virtual machines in one project. This allows you to visualize connections and process-level details between machines, which helps with grouping them for assessment and migration. You can learn more about agentless dependency mapping here.
With a better understanding of your server estate and dependencies, you can generate an assessment report to understand Azure readiness, cloud cost estimations, and right-sizing recommendations. Read more about best practices for assessments in our prioritizing assessments blog.
With the assessment complete, you’ll be ready to migrate your workloads safely and efficiently. The Azure Migrate Server Migration tool now lets you to migrate UEFI machines to Azure Gen 2 virtual machines. With no boot type conversion needed, you can migrate UEFI machines as is and take advantage of additional Gen 2 virtual machine features. You can now also select a specific Availability Zone to place migrated machines in when migrating to an Azure Region that supports Availability Zones to achieve increased resiliency and security.
Looking for more than just a lift-and-shift server migration for your datacenter? Azure Migrate now supports migrating .NET applications to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The brand-new feature is available in preview, and allows you to containerize ASP.NET applications and run them on Windows containers in AKS.
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