Azure Local for Data Centre Modernisation
Hybrid computing (i.e. integrating on-premises systems and public-Cloud capacity-on-demand) offers a wealth of benefits, including:
Rapid upscaling to meet higher demand to support business peak demand.
‘Spin-up, spin-down’ capabilities to accommodate training and development activities.
Integration with monitoring and management tools to provide the long-promised “single pane of glass” management interface across all deployed resources.
Extending this concept by combining virtualised compute, storage, and networking in an optimised package, Azure Local reduces operating complexity for on-premises requirements and improves stability and scalability - and Azure Arc for Azure Local provides a holistic management interface across all components.
Hyperconverged systems eliminate the reliance on technology such as storage-area networks whilst retaining the flexibility of direct access to on-premises scale-out storage resources, where necessary.This is a key advantage of Azure Local when compared to a public-Cloud only approach. Retaining close coupling of compute and storage eliminates unpredictable network conditions from the user experience, as well as public Cloud data transit costs.
Azure Local couples hybrid integration with a robust and scalable hyperconverged platform. Built on Hyper-V, Azure Local utilises the power and convenience of hyperconverged technology to optimise performance, scalability, energy efficiency, and management efficiency. Considered as a whole, this makes it a compelling solution for data centre modernisation.Eliminating the storage fabric and appliances reduces data centre footprint and power consumption and can streamline operations through consolidation of reporting tools and elimination of skills silos. Together, these factors drive a significant RoI on HCI solutions, which Azure Local extends further with its hybrid capabilities.
Providing administration via tools familiar to existing IT teams - both those in the Azure public Cloud for existing Azure workflows and those traditionally used for Hyper-V deployments - the solution generally requires minimum re-skilling of internal teams.Despite this, to support the modernisation of data centre operations, Cloud-native management techniques - i.e. DevOps - can be used across all aspects of the solution, automating infrastructure-level tasks via Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Security as Code. This will then service as part of a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline.
These approaches:
Provide repeatability to system configuration. This enables staged configuration changes to be reliably deployed to production systems, for example.
Provide auditability since complete configurations can be stored in a version control repository, such as GitHub.
Reduce the impact of human error, since all changes can be repeatably deployed (initially in test environments) and peer reviewed.
Consolidate operations skillsets, since the complete infrastructure can be managed using PowerShell, ARM Templates, and Terraform, whilst skills in 3rd party proprietary operating systems might no longer be required.
Whilst virtualisation has allowed administrators to adopt a ‘one application per server’ model, and so isolate applications from each other without requiring a huge number of physical machines, this has created a large overhead in the management of many instances of (and, over time, versions of) base operating systems. For this reason, many applications are now moving to a containerised deployment topology.
Unlike virtual machines, container-based deployment does not maintain a base operating system for each application.
Instead, the containerisation layer enables multiple containers to run on a single machine and share the underlying operating system whilst remaining fully isolated. Because of this, containers consume fewer compute and human management resources than a comparable deployment based on virtual machines. As such, containerisation can improve application density at both platform and IT department resource levels.
Further benefits include:
Resource efficiency
Scalability
Agility and fast deployment
Portability
Isolation
Version control and collaboration
Fault isolation and recovery
Supporting the evolution of IT services through containerisation, Azure Local supports Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) right out the box and is fully integrated with the Azure public Cloud framework:
Improve scalability and flexibility
Reduce operational complexity
Enhance security and compliance
Optimise cost efficiency
Other
