Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Manage and find data with Blob Index for Azure Storage—now in preview

 

Blob Index—a managed secondary index, allowing you to store multi-dimensional object attributes to describe your data objects for Azure Blob storage—is now available in preview. Built on top of blob storage, Blob Index offers consistent reliability, availability, and performance for all your workloads. Blob Index provides native object management and filtering capabilities, which allows you to categorize and find data based on attribute tags set on the data.

Manage and find data with Blob Index

As datasets get larger, finding specific related objects in a sea of data can be difficult and frustrating. Previously, clients used the ListBlobs API to retrieve 5000 lexicographical records at a time, parse through the list, and repeat until you found the blobs you wanted. Some users also resorted to managing a separate lookup table to find specific objects. These separate tables can get out-of-sync—increasing cost, complexity, and frustration. Customers should not have to worry about data organization or index table management, and instead focus on building powerful applications to grow their business.

Blob Index alleviates the data management and querying problem with support for all blob types (Block Blob, Append Blob, and Page Blob). Blob Index is exposed through a familiar blob storage endpoint and APIs, allowing you to easily store and access both your data and classification indices on the same service to reduce application complexity.

To populate the blob index, you define key-value tag attributes on your data, either on new data during upload or on existing data already in your storage account. These blob index tags are stored alongside your underlying blob data. The blob indexing engine then automatically reads the new tags, indexes them, and exposes them to a user-queryable blob index. Using the Azure portal, REST APIs, or SDKs, you can then issue a FindBlobsByTags API call specify a set of criteria. Blob storage will return a filtered result set consisting only of the blobs that met the match criteria.

The below scenario is an example of how Blob Index works:

In a storage account container with a million blobs, a user uploads a new blob “B2” with the following blob index tags: < Status = Unprocessed, Quality = 8K, Source = RAW >.
The blob and its blob index tags are persisted to the storage account and the account indexing engine exposes the new blob index shortly after.
Later on, an encoding application wants to find all unprocessed media files that are at least 4K resolution quality. It issues a FindBlobs API call to find all blobs that match the following criteria: < Status = Unprocessed AND Quality >= 4K AND Status == RAW>.
The blob index quickly returns just blob “B2,” the sole blob out of one million blobs that matches the specified criteria. The encoding application can quickly start its processing job, saving idle compute time and money.

 

Platform feature integrations with Blob Index

Blob Index not only helps you categorize, manage, and find your blob data but also provides integrations with other Blob service features, such as Lifecycle management.

Using the new blobIndexMatch as a filter, you can move data to cooler tiers or delete data based on the tags applied to your blobs. This allows you to be more granular in your rules and only move or delete data if they match your specified criteria.

The following sample lifecycle management policy applies to block blobs in the “videofiles” container and tiers objects to archive storage after one day only if the blobs match the blob index tag of Status = ‘Processed’ and Source = ‘RAW’.

Lifecycle management integration with Blob Index is just the beginning. We will be adding more integrations with other blob platform features soon!

Conditional blob operations with Blob Index tags

In REST versions 2019-10-10 and higher, most blob service APIs now support a new conditional header, x-ms-if-tags, so that the operation will only succeed if the specified blob index tags condition is met. If the condition is not met, the operation will fail, thus not modifying the blob. This functionality by Blob Index can help ensure data operations only occur on explicitly tagged blobs and can protect against inadvertent deletion or modification by multi-threaded applications.

How to get started

To enroll in the Blog Index preview, submit a request to register this feature to your subscription by running the following PowerShell or CLI commands:

Register by using PowerShell

Register-AzProviderFeature -FeatureName BlobIndex -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Storage

Register-AzResourceProvider -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Storage

Register by using Azure CLI

az feature register –namespace Microsoft.Storage –name BlobIndex

​az provider register –namespace 'Microsoft.Storage'

After your request is approved, any existing or new General-purpose v2 (GPv2) storage accounts in France Central and France South can leverage Blob Index’s capabilities. As with most previews, we recommend that this feature should not be used for production workloads until it reaches general availability.

Build it, use it, and tell us about it!

Once you’re registered and approved for the preview, you can start leveraging all that Blob Index has to offer by setting tags on new or existing data, finding data based on tags, and setting rich lifecycle management policies with tag filters. For more information, please see Manage and find data on Azure Blob Storage with Blob Index.

Note, customers are charged for the total number of Blob Index tags within a storage account, averaged over the month. Requests to SetBlobTags, GetBlobTags, and FindBlobsByTags are charged in accordance to their respective operation types. There is no cost for the indexing engine. See Block Blob pricing to learn more.

We will continue to improve our feature capabilities and are looking forward to hearing your feedback regarding Blob Index or other features through email at BlobIndexPreview@microsoft.com. As a reminder, we love hearing all of your ideas and suggestions about Azure Storage, which you can post at Azure Storage feedback forum.
Quelle: Azure

Cross Region Restore (CRR) for Azure Virtual Machines using Azure Backup

Today we're introducing the preview of Cross Region Restore (CRR) for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) support using Microsoft Azure Backup.

Azure Backup uses Recovery Services vault to hold customers' backup data which offers both local and geographic redundancy. To ensure high availability of backed up data, Azure Backup defaults storage settings to geo-redundancy. By virtue, backed up data in the primary region is geo-replicated to an Azure-paired secondary region. If Azure declares a disaster in the primary region, the data replicated in the secondary region is available to restore in the secondary region only. With the introduction of this new feature, the customer can initiate restores in a secondary region at will to mitigate real downtime disaster in the primary region for their environment. This makes the secondary region restores completely customer-controlled. Azure Backup utilizes the backed-up data replicated to the secondary region for such restores.

For the following scenarios, customers can leverage the secondary region data mentioned above using this feature:

Full outage: Previously, if there was an Azure primary region disaster for the customer, the customer had to wait for Azure to declare disaster to access their secondary region data. With the cross region restore feature, there is no wait time for the customer to recover data in the secondary region. The customer can initiate restores in the secondary region even before Azure declares an outage.
Partial outage: Downtime can occur in specific storage clusters where Azure Backup stores a customer’s backed up data or even in-network, connecting Azure Backup and storage clusters associated with a customer’s backed up data. Customers previously could not perform restores to primary or secondary regions. With Cross Region Restore, customers can perform a restore in the secondary region using a replica of backed up data in the secondary region.
No outage: Previously there was no provision for customers to conduct business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) drills for audit or compliance purposes with the secondary region data. This new capability enables customers to perform a restore of backed up data in the secondary region even if there is not a full or partial outage in the primary region for business continuity and disaster recovery drills.

Azure Backup leverages storage accounts’ read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) capability to support restores from a secondary region. Note that due to delays in storage replication from primary to secondary, there will be latency in the backed up data being available for a restore in the secondary region.

Key features available with the preview include:

Self-service recoveries of secondary backed up data in a secondary region
Enables the ability to conduct disaster recovery (DR) drills for audit and compliance anytime
High availability of backup data during partial or full outages of an Azure region

With this preview, Azure Backup will support restoring Azure Virtual Machines as well as disks from a secondary region.

How to onboard to this feature

Cross Region Restore can be enabled on Recovery Services vault by turning on the Cross Region Restore setting for Recovery Services vault with the geo-redundant storage redundancy setting. Note that this feature does not support the restore of classic virtual machines as well as vaults with locally redundant storage (LRS) redundancy settings. Only Recovery Service vault enabled with geo-redundant storage settings will have the option to onboard to this feature. Cross Region Restore is now available in all Azure public regions. The regions where this feature is supported are updated in this Cross Region Restore documentation.

The road ahead

Azure Backup will extend its support to all other workloads apart from Azure Virtual Machines in the coming months. Learn more about Cross Region Restore and sign up for the preview.

Pricing

Currently pricing for enabling Cross Region Restore on Recovery Services vault will remain the same as pricing for geo-redundant storage based Recovery Services vault. Please refer to Azure Backup pricing to learn more about the details of Cross Region Restore pricing. For further queries related to pricing, please contact AskAzureBackupTeam.

Get started with Cross Region Restore

Learn more about Cross Region Restore.
Getting started with Recovery Services vault.
Need help? Reach out to Azure Backup forum for support.
Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup by contributing new ideas and voting up existing ones.
Follow us on Twitter @AzureBackup for the latest news and updates.

Quelle: Azure

Azure Container Registry: Mitigating data exfiltration with dedicated data endpoints

Azure Container Registry announces dedicated data endpoints, enabling tightly scoped client firewall rules to specific registries, minimizing data exfiltration concerns.

Pulling content from a registry involves two endpoints:

Registry endpoint, often referred to as the login URL, used for authentication and content discovery.
A command like docker pull contoso.azurecr.io/hello-world makes a REST request which authenticates and negotiates the layers which represent the requested artifact.
Data endpoints serve blobs representing content layers.

Registry managed storage accounts

Azure Container Registry is a multi-tenant service, where the data endpoint storage accounts are managed by the registry service. There are many benefits for managed storage, such as load balancing, contentious content splitting, multiple copies for higher concurrent content delivery, and multi-region support with geo-replication.

Azure Private Link virtual network support

Azure Container Registry recently announced Private Link support, enabling private endpoints from Azure Virtual Networks to be placed on the managed registry service. In this case, both the registry and data endpoints are accessible from within the virtual network, using private IPs.

The public endpoint can then be removed, securing the managed registry and storage accounts to access from within the virtual network.
 

Unfortunately, virtual network connectivity isn’t always an option.

Client firewall rules and data exfiltration risks

When connecting to a registry from on-prem hosts, IoT devices, custom build agents, or when Private Link may not be an option, client firewall rules may be applied, limiting access to specific resources.

 
As customers locked down their client firewall configurations, they realized they must create a rule with a wildcard for all storage accounts, raising concerns for data-exfiltration. A bad actor could deploy code that would be capable of writing to their storage account.

To mitigate data-exfiltration concerns, Azure Container Registry is making dedicated data endpoints available.

Dedicated data endpoints

When dedicated data endpoints are enabled, layers are retrieved from the Azure Container Registry service, with fully qualified domain names representing the registry domain. As any registry may become geo-replicated, a regional pattern is used:

[registry].[region].data.azurecr.io.

For the Contoso example, multiple regional data endpoints are added supporting the local region with a nearby replica.

With dedicated data endpoints, the bad actor is blocked from writing to other storage accounts.

Enabling dedicated data endpoints

Note: Switching to dedicated data-endpoints will impact clients that have configured firewall access to the existing *.blob.core.windows.net endpoints, causing pull failures. To assure clients have consistent access, add the new data-endpoints to the client firewall rules. Once completed, existing registries can enable dedicated data-endpoints through the az cli.

Using az cli version 2.4.0 or greater, run the az acr update command:

az acr update –name contoso –data-endpoint-enabled

To view the data endpoints, including regional endpoints for geo-replicated registries, use the az acr show-endpoints cli:

az acr show-endpoints –name contoso

outputs:

{
  "loginServer": "contoso.azurecr.io",
  "dataEndpoints": [
    {
      "region": "eastus",
      "endpoint": "contoso.eastus.data.azurecr.io",
    },
    {
      "region": "westus",
      "endpoint": "contoso.westus.data.azurecr.io",
    }
  ]
}

Security with Azure Private Link

Azure Private Link is the most secure way to control network access between clients and the registry as network traffic is limited to the Azure Virtual Network, using private IPs. When Private Link isn’t an option, dedicated data endpoints can provide secure knowledge in what resources are accessible from each client.

Pricing information

Dedicated data endpoints are a feature of premium registries.

For more information on dedicated data endpoints, see the pricing information here.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Cost Management + Billing updates – April 2020

Whether you're a new student, thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints and you need to know what you're spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management + Billing comes in.

We're always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Azure Cost Management + Billing can help you better understand where you're accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Azure Spot Virtual Machines now generally available.
Monitoring your reservation and Marketplace purchases with budgets.
Automate cost savings with Azure Resource Graph.
Azure Cost Management covered by FedRAMP High.
Tell us about your reporting goals.
New ways to save money with Azure.
New videos and learning opportunities.
Documentation updates.

Let's dig into the details.

 

Azure Spot Virtual Machines now generally available

We all want to save money. We often look at our largest workloads for savings opportunities, but make sure you don't stop there. You may be able to save up to 90 percent on interruptible virtual machine workloads with Azure Spot Virtual Machines (Spot VMs), now generally available.

Spot VMs allow you to utilize unused compute capacity at very low rates compared to pay-as-you-go prices. Spot VMs are best suited to batch jobs, supplementing workloads that can be interrupted, dev/test environments, stateless applications, and other fault-tolerant applications. Spot VMs can be very useful in reducing the cost of running applications significantly or alternatively staying within budget while scaling out your applications.

Learn more about how to identify and track Spot VM costs in Azure Cost Management.

 

Monitoring your reservation and Marketplace purchases with budgets

Azure Cost Management budgets help you plan for and drive organizational accountability by ensuring everyone is aware as costs increase. You already know you can monitor usage of your Azure and AWS services. Now you can also track and get notified when a reservation or Marketplace purchase causes you to exceed your budget.

With the inclusion of purchases, your budgets become even more powerful. You have a more complete picture of your costs, enabling you to proactively manage and optimize costs to stay within your financial constraints. You can even target these costs more specifically, for finer-grained monitoring.

Let's say you don't expect your Marketplace purchases to be over $1000 per month. Create a monthly budget where PublisherType is set to Marketplace and ChargeType is set to Purchase. Setup notifications for 50 percent, 75 percent, or another portion of your budget, and you'll get an email if those thresholds are hit. Pretty simple.

How about reservation purchases? You may not want to limit reservation purchases since they do help save money, but maybe you just want to be notified when they're used throughout the organization. Create a yearly budget where PublisherType is set to Azure and ChargeType is set to Purchase. You'll get notified as purchases cause the threshold to be exceeded and at that point, you can even increase the budget amount to continue to get notified as new reservations are purchased.

Alternatively, if you only want to monitor usage, simply filter ChargeType to Usage. That's it!

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Learn more about how to monitor and control spending with Azure Cost Management budgets.

 

Automate cost savings with Azure Resource Graph

You already know Azure Advisor helps you reduce and optimize costs without sacrificing quality. And you may already be familiar with the Azure Advisor APIs that enable you to integrate recommendations into your own reporting or automation. Now you can also get recommendations via Azure Resource Graph.

Azure Resource Graph enables you to explore your Azure resources across subscriptions. You can use advanced filtering, grouping, and sorting based on resource properties and relationships to target specific workloads and even take that further to automate resource management and governance at scale. Now, with the addition of Azure Advisor recommendations, you can also query your cost saving recommendations.

Querying for recommendations is easy. Just open Azure Resource Graph in the Azure portal and explore the advisorresources table. Let's say you want a summary of your potential cost savings opportunities:

advisorresources
// First, we trim down the list to only cost recommendations
| where type == 'microsoft.advisor/recommendations'
| where properties.category == 'Cost'
//
// Then we group rows…
| summarize
// …count the resources and add up the total savings
     resources = dcount(tostring(properties.resourceMetadata.resourceId)),
     savings = sum(todouble(properties.extendedProperties.savingsAmount))
     by
// …for each recommendation type (solution)
     solution = tostring(properties.shortDescription.solution),
     currency = tostring(properties.extendedProperties.savingsCurrency)
//
// And lastly, format and sort the list
| project solution, resources, savings = bin(savings, 0.01), currency
| order by savings desc

Take this one step further using Logic Apps or Azure Functions and send out weekly emails to subscription and resource group owners. Or pivot this on resource ID and setup an approval workflow to automatically delete unused resources or downsize underutilized virtual machines. The sky's the limit!

 

Azure Cost Management covered by FedRAMP High

Azure Cost Management is now one of the 101 services covered by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High Provisional Authorization to Operate (P-ATO) for Azure Government—more services than any other cloud provider.

Learn more about the expanded FedRAMP High coverage.

 

Tell us about your reporting goals

As you know, we're always looking for ways to learn more about your needs and expectations. If you already responded last month, thank you! If not, we'd like to learn about the most important reporting tasks and goals you have when managing and optimizing costs. We'll use your inputs from this survey to help prioritize reporting improvements within Cost Management + Billing experiences over the coming months. The 9-question survey should take about 10 minutes. Please share this with anyone working with Azure Cost Management + Billing. The more diverse perspectives we get, the better we can serve you, your team, and your organization.

Take the survey.

 

New ways to save money with Azure

Lots of cost optimization improvements over the past month. Here are a few you might be interested in:

Azure Spot VMs are now generally available, enabling you to save up to 90 percent on interruptible workloads.
Save up to 49 percent with new 3-year reservations for Azure Database for MariaDB.
Save up to 65 percent with new 3-year reservations for Azure Database for MySQL.
Save up to 65 percent with Azure Dedicated Host reservations.
Simplify Windows virtual machine management and save money with Azure DevTest discounts.
Reduce user license costs with Azure DevOps multi-org billing.

 

New videos and learning opportunities

For those visual learners out there, there are five new videos and a new MS Learn learning path you should take a look at:

Setting up for success (8 minutes).
Setting up entity hierarchies (8 minutes).
Controlling access (12 minutes).
Reporting by dimensions and tags (8 minutes).
How to set up "Connectors for AWS" in Azure Cost Management (9 minutes).
Control Azure spending and manage bills with Azure Cost Management + Billing (2 hours 36 minutes).

Follow the Azure Cost Management + Billing YouTube channel to stay in the loop with new videos as they're released and let us know what you'd like to see next.

Want a more guided experience? Start with Control Azure spending and manage bills with Azure Cost Management + Billing.

 

Documentation updates

Here are a few documentation updates you might be interested in:

Prevent unexpected charges with Azure Cost Management + Billing.
How to enable access to costs for new/renewed EA enrollments.
How to determine what reservations you should purchase.
Added reservation and spot usage analysis to common cost analysis uses.
Create management groups as part of a Resource Manager deployment template.

Want to keep an eye on all of the documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management + Billing doc change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request.

 

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don't forget to check out the previous Azure Cost Management + Billing updates. We're always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow @AzureCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. And, as always, share your ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum.

We know these are trying times for everyone. Best wishes from the Azure Cost Management team. Stay safe and stay healthy!
Quelle: Azure

Azure Files share snapshot management by Azure Backup is now generally available

Microsoft Azure Files offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. For users of Azure Files, share snapshots have offered a read-only version of file shares from a previous point in time. Share snapshots are also incremental in nature, making their storage usage efficient. Although customers can simply use these share snapshots to go back in time, managing snapshots using scripts or automation is a labor-intensive process. Microsoft Azure Backup offers a simple and reliable way to backup and protect Azure Files using share snapshots.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of snapshot management for Azure Files by Azure Backup. Apart from being available natively in the cloud, Azure Backup offers significant benefits while protecting file shares using Recovery Services vault.

Key benefits

Simple configuration: You can use the +Backup option from Recovery Services vault to discover all unprotected file shares in storage accounts, select multiple file shares if necessary, choose a policy, and configure backup for all file shares at once. Once configured, you can manage your backups directly from the Azure Files portal.
Zero infrastructure solution: Being an Azure native solution, using Azure Backup means that you don’t need to run any additional compute. This saves you from setting up infrastructure to schedule snapshots, or maintain or modify them periodically.

Azure File Sync users do not need to back up their data from on-premises servers as the entire data is available in cloud. You can enable cloud tiering on your on-premises servers or machines and continue to use Azure Backup to protect the cloud data.

Flexible backup policy: Azure Backup provides you with the ability to create and modify policies of choice to define the schedule for snapshots.

You’re already used to creating daily snapshots as part of the Azure Backup policy. As part of the general availability release, we have also introduced the ability to create weekly, monthly, and yearly snapshots. You can also choose retention for these snapshots for up to 10 years. The backup policy automatically takes care of pruning expired snapshots, allowing you to stay within the 200 snapshots limit per file share.

Comprehensive restore capabilities: Azure Backup offers a variety of options to restore your file share data. You can choose to restore the entire file share or individual files and folders. Restores can also be done to the original location or to alternate file shares in the same or different storage accounts. Azure Backup also preserves and restores all access control lists (ACLs) of files and folders.

Apart from the options above, Azure Backup ensures that the restores are sync-aware. We coordinate with the Azure File Sync service to trigger a resync back to on-premises servers once we complete restores to the associated file shares in the cloud.

Protection against accidental deletion: Accidental deletion can happen at multiple levels.

Individual files and folders: The lowest level is a file or folder. This is also the most common scenario. Using scheduled snapshots and being able to restore individual files and folders addresses this issue.
Snapshot: Azure Backup becomes the initiator of the snapshot that it takes using the backup policy. However, administrators can still delete specific snapshots in their file shares. These deletions are not recommended as the restore points become invalid. We’re actively working on a mechanism that will allow Azure Backup to prevent you from any accidental snapshot deletions.
File share: You could delete your file share and end up wiping out all snapshots taken for the file share. Azure Backup is currently working on protecting against accidental deletion of your file shares and the solution should be available in the first few regions soon.
Storage account: Deleting storage accounts can wipe out all file shares inside the storage account along with its snapshots. Customer conversations indicate that, although this is a less common scenario, there needs to be protection against it. Hence, Azure Backup takes a delete lock on a storage account as soon as the first file share in the storage account is configured for backup.

On-demand snapshots: Apart from the backup policy option to schedule snapshots, you can also choose to create up to four on-demand backups every day. Taking multiple on-demand backups in a day reduces the recovery point objective (RPO) for customers. Although Azure Backup purges these snapshots based on the retention set during backup, you need to ensure that you do not exceed the 200 snapshots per file share limit while using this capability.
Alerts and reports: Integration with Azure Backup alerts enables you to configure email notifications for critical failures. Once the general availability release is available across all regions, you will start seeing backup related data in Azure Backup reports.

What’s next?

Based on our conversations with customers, we‘re working to deliver functionality above and beyond snapshot management using Azure Backup, including the ability to copy file share data to Recovery Services vault. We welcome this and all feedback from customers that help us align our work on features you will value. You can help us by filling out this survey.

Getting started

Start protecting your file shares by using the Recovery Services vaults in your region. For the list of supported regions, please refer to the support matrix. The backup goal option in the vault overview will let you choose Azure File shares to back up from storage accounts in your region. You can refer to our documentation for more details.

Pricing

For pricing details, please follow the Azure Backup pricing page for updates as we are currently rolling out the regional prices. Snapshot management using Azure Backup will not be chargeable for customers until July 1, 2020. All users can access and trial the feature without added cost through June 2020. You can write to AskAzureBackupTeam@microsoft.com for any feedback and queries.

Related links and additional content

Support matrix for Azure Files snapshot management using Azure Backup.
If you are new to Azure Backup, start configuring the backup on the Azure portal.
Want more details? Check out Azure Backup documentation.
Need help? Reach out to the Azure Backup forum for support.
Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup by contributing new ideas and voting up existing ones.
Follow us on Twitter @AzureBackup for the latest news and updates.

Quelle: Azure

Azure + Red Hat: Expanding hybrid management and data services for easier innovation anywhere

For the past few years, Microsoft and Red Hat have co-developed hybrid solutions enabling customers to innovate both on-premises and in the cloud. In May 2019, we announced the general availability of Azure Red Hat OpenShift, allowing enterprises to run critical container-based production workloads via an OpenShift managed service on Azure, jointly operated by Microsoft and Red Hat.

Microsoft and Red Hat are now working together to further extend Azure services to hybrid environments across on-premises and multi-cloud with upcoming support of Azure Arc for OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), so our customers will be able to more effectively develop, deploy, and manage cloud-native applications anywhere. With Azure Arc, customers will have a more consistent management and operational experience across their Microsoft hybrid cloud including Red Hat OpenShift and RHEL.

What’s new for Red Hat Customers with Azure Arc

As part of the Azure Arc preview, we’re expanding Azure Arc’s Linux and Kubernetes management capabilities to add support specifically for Red Hat customers, enabling you to:

Organize, secure, and govern your Red Hat ecosystem across environments

Many of our customers have workloads sprawling across clouds, datacenters, and edge locations. Azure Arc enables customers to centrally manage, secure, and control RHEL servers and OpenShift clusters from Azure at scale. Wherever the workloads are running, customers can view inventory and search from the Azure Portal. They can apply policies and manage compliance for connected servers and clusters from Azure Policy; either one or many clusters at a time. Customers can enhance their security posture through built-in Azure security policies and RBAC for the managed infrastructure that works the same way wherever they run. As Azure Arc progresses towards general availability, more policies will be enabled, such as reporting on expiring certificates, password complexity, managing SSH keys, and enforcing disk encryption.

In addition, with SQL Server 2019 for RHEL 8 is now quicker to deploy via new images now available in the Azure Marketplace, we’re expanding Azure Arc to manage SQL Server on RHEL, providing integrated database and server governance via unified Azure Policies.

Finally, Azure Arc makes it easy to use Azure Management services such as Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center when dealing with workloads and infrastructure running outside of Azure.

Manage OpenShift clusters and applications at scale

Manage container-based applications running in Azure Red Hat OpenShift service on Azure, as well as OpenShift clusters running on IaaS, virtual machines (VMs), or on-premises bare metal. Applications defined in Github repositories can be automatically deployed via Azure Policy and Azure Arc to any repo-linked OpenShift cluster, and policies can be used to keep them up to date. New application versions can be distributed globally to all Azure Arc-managed OpenShift clusters using Github pull requests, with full DevOps CI/CD pipeline integrations for logging and quality testing. Additionally, if an application is modified in an unauthorized way, the change is reverted, so your OpenShift environment remains stable and compliant.

Run Azure Data Services on OpenShift and anywhere else

Azure Arc enables you to run Azure data services on OpenShift on-premises, at the edge, and in multi-cloud environments, whether a self-deployed cluster or a managed container service like Azure Red Hat OpenShift. With Azure Arc support for Azure SQL Managed Instance on OpenShift, you’ll know your container-based data infrastructure is always current and up to date; Microsoft SQL Big Data Cluster (BDC) support for OpenShift provides a new container-based deployment pattern for big data storage and analytics, allowing you to elastically scale your data with your dynamic OpenShift based application anywhere it runs.

Managing multiple configurations for an on-premises OpenShift deployment from Azure Arc.

Azure SQL Managed Instances within Azure Arc.

If you’d like to learn more about how Azure is working with Red Hat to make innovation easier for customers in hybrid cloud environments, join us for a fireside chat between Scott Guthrie, EVP of Cloud and AI at Microsoft, and Paul Cormier, president and CEO of Red Hat, including a demo of Azure Arc for Red Hat today at the Red Hat Summit 2020 Virtual Experience.

Private hybrid clusters and OpenShift 4 added to Azure Red Hat OpenShift

Rounding out our hybrid offerings for Red Hat customers, today we’re announcing the general availability of Azure Red Hat OpenShift on OpenShift 4.

This release brings key innovations from Red Hat OpenShift 4 to Azure Red Hat OpenShift. Additionally we‘re enabling features to support hybrid and enterprise customer scenarios, such as:

Private API and ingress endpoints: Customers can now choose between public and private cluster management (API) and ingress endpoints. With private endpoints and Azure Express Route support we’re enabling private hybrid clusters, allowing our mutual customers to extend their on-premises solutions to Azure.
 
Industry compliance certifications: To help customers meet their compliance obligations across regulated industries and markets worldwide, Azure Red Hat OpenShift is now PCI DSS, HITRUST, and FedRAMP certified. Azure maintains the largest compliance portfolio in the industry both in terms of total number of offerings, as well as number of customer-facing services in assessment scope.
 
Multi-Availability Zones clusters: To ensure the highest resiliency, cluster components are now deployed across 3 Azure Availability Zones in supported Azure regions to maintain high availability for the most demanding mission-critical applications and data. Azure Red Hat OpenShift has a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.9 percent.

Cluster-admin support: We’ve enabled the cluster-admin role on Azure Red Hat OpenShift clusters, enabling full cluster customization capabilities, such as running privileged containers and installing Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs).

Getting started with Azure Arc

To learn more about Azure Arc for RHEL environments, get started with the preview today. For anyone interested in Azure Arc enabled OpenShift, we will be going into public preview soon. Contact us here for more info.
Quelle: Azure