Azure Hybrid at Ignite: Microsoft signals multi-cloud, multi-edge capabilities

Microsoft Ignite, the company's annual IT-focused conference is now underway. Hybrid cloud capabilities are taking center stage, with an emphasis on "hybrid by design" and new options for developers around Azure Hybrid.

Azure Arc takes center stage

In recent months, Microsoft has increasingly promoted Azure Arc as a way to extend Azure management capabilities into infrastructure. According to Microsoft CVP Julia White, the offering has seen widespread adoption since it was rolled out. It's now in use with customers as varied as Avanade, Fujitsu, Siemens Healthineers, KPMG and Africa's Talking.

Arc-enabled data services are in-preview while Arc-enabled servers are generally available. This means customers will be able to manage both Linux and Windows servers and VMs spanning multi-cloud and multi-edge environments.

Extending Stack

Microsoft is taking steps to position its services for intelligent edge computing with Azure Stack and related offerings and modernize on-prem data centers. With these objectives in-mind, the Azure team is previewing Kubernetes Services on Stack HCI, as well as broadening Stack Hub with AMD GPUs for visual-intensive apps. White wrote:

Over three years ago, we were first to market with Azure Stack that enables customers to bring cloud innovation into their own datacenters to take advantage of cloud technology while meeting any regulatory compliance requirement and the ability to run disconnected. Since then, we’ve continued to grow the Azure Stack portfolio to provide cloud consistent infrastructure and Azure services to a range of solutions within local datacenters and running at the edge.

Along with Stack tools, SQL Edge entered general availability for IoT gateways and edge devices, founded on ...