At Avanade, we’re inspired by the evolution of the Azure hybrid story. We’ve been involved since before there was a hybrid story. Windows Azure Pack, Azure Stack Hub, Azure Stack Edge, and now Arc and Azure Stack HCI. Each of these platforms builds on the experiences of the past to further unlock the value of cloud. In today’s post I’m going to talk about Azure Arc and an asset we’ve built that leverages Azure and Arc data to provide insights for our clients.

What is Azure Arc?
Azure Arc is a mechanism that allows you to bring ALL your resources into the Azure control plane and portal. You can then deploy Azure PaaS (Platform as a Service) services on those Arc-enabled workloads, use Azure management and compliance tools, and manage them as Azure resources. These resources can be on premises, in colocation facilities, or even non-Azure clouds. That’s right, even non-Azure environments.

There’s now a solution for hybrid and multicloud environments
One of the primary reasons to adopt public cloud is to take advantage of the investment in the unified control plane and its integrated features and technologies. If Azure is your control plane of choice, ideally everything you run will be in Azure. You integrate with one common well known API, one set of compliance, monitoring and management tools, and use the differentiated assets and services that make Azure great. The real world however dictates you probably have resources outside of Azure. This might be for legacy, contracting or financial reasons, or maybe because you need to be closer to the edge.

Arc allows you to incorporate all these resources in the Azure control plane, use cloud native hosting technologies like Azure PaaS, and use value-added Azure services (Azure Monitor, Azure Update, Azure Backup, etc.), regardless of the location.

You can now enjoy consistency across your entire estate
The ability to apply cloud management strategies to an entire estate, regardless of location means we can take our cloud best practices and leverage those across entire client estates, not just their Azure estates. This also means that we can take a more critical look at where workloads reside and decouple the question of where a workload physically lives from the preference of how we manage it or the technology of how we host it. This enables a different approach to migrations, one where we only migrate the workloads that make sense to run in the cloud. Some workloads will benefit from remaining in their existing locations, perhaps for financial or operational reasons, yet they too can also benefit from the application of modern cloud practices.”

Wait, so I can Arc everything, then migrate only what makes sense?
Yes, Avanade has built a capability as a part of our Applications and Infrastructure offerings to analyze your existing Azure estate and beyond. It looks at all your resources through Arc and the Azure control plane, and helps us understand what each resource is doing, what applications are running, what the dependencies are, and what makes financial and operational sense to migrate. It uses Arc data to predict what a workload will cost to run in Azure and uses the attributes of the current host to figure out projected end of life, allowing you to make an informed financial choice about moving workloads that make sense to move.

But wait, there’s more…
We also analyze existing Azure workloads and look for cost optimization opportunities, including orphaned disks, missing hybrid use benefits, and many other things. We give you visibility into your cost information, organized by tags, regions, resource types, resource groups and subscriptions. Furthermore, we’ll give you complete visibility of the dependency map of all your resources – whether in the cloud or made visible through Arc.

How do I take advantage of this?
Every Avanade resource is equipped with this capability as part of any engagement. Enroll your resources in Arc (it is free) and contact us or to learn how you can take advantage. The onboarding process is simple, takes only a few minutes and uses Azure Lighthouse with a reader role for delegated access. These capabilities are delivered as an ever-evolving SaaS (Software as a Service) platform and will continue to improve over time.

This capability and our expertise on Azure Arc are examples of how Avanade leads from the front as the most innovative Azure consultancy and managed service provider.