Azure Arc & Lighthouse: Managing IT Infrastructure Anywhere at-scale

by | Sep 22, 2020 | Azure, Technology, Uncategorized | 0 comments

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.

 

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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:

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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Azure Sentinel when working with Lighthouse, can track incidents and attacks across tenants as well as define cross-tenant KQL queries.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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. 

 

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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.

 

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Inventory Management

Multitenant queries with Azure Resource Graph, can now also include Azure Arc enabled resources with filtering, using tags or tracking changes.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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Access Management

Auditability provided by Lighthouse is kept as Azure Arc supports RBAC and the Azure activity log will keep track of actions.

 

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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.

 

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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: 

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

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