Preface

Cloud computing is the preferred method of hosting applications for all sizes of organizations across the globe today. In almost every enterprise scenario, you will find specific requirements and circumstances that require the organization to keep running some infrastructure in their on-premises environments or in other cloud platforms.

Hybrid cloud seems to be the ideal solution for everyone; you get the best of public cloud services and still have the option to run the specific workloads on your own servers. With this flexibility, there comes the challenges of managing and governing these environments with specially designed management tools. It is not rare to see organizations having different teams managing their on-premises data center and cloud environments with completely different sets of tools and processes. Reduced management overhead is a key selling point for cloud platforms, but with hybrid cloud architecture, you may see increased management overhead to manage various environments.

Azure Arc aims to eliminate the management complexity introduced with hybrid cloud solutions. Azure Arc lets you design centralized management and governance processes that can work irrespective of the locations where your infrastructure is hosted, be it Azure, other cloud platforms, or your own data center. It also allows your developers to continue using Azure's modern database services even if they're designing applications that have to be hosted outside Azure and require minimal latency database connections.

In this book, you will find step-by-step explanations of key Azure Arc concepts along with practical examples that demonstrate the key use cases of Azure Arc and hybrid cloud solutions in general. It follows a hands-on approach where each solution is followed by the steps you'd follow to implement it in your infrastructure. By the end of this book, you will have a solid understanding of Azure Arc architecture, implementation, and use cases.