Azure Arc in the limelight at Microsoft Ignite 2021

At recent Microsoft conferences, themes like hybrid cloud and multicloud have come up often. At Ignite 2021 Microsoft general manager Arpan Shah highlighted a growing variety of Azure Arc capabilities that extend machine learning services and support for Kubernetes.

Machine Learning and developer tools

Azure Arc is intended as a way to manage across almost any infrastructure including cloud, multicloud, and on-prem. Now, Azure Machine Learning is part of the portfolio. Going forward, customers can sign up for Arc-enabled Machine Learning and deploy it to a Kubernetes cluster. This extends machine learning models to hybrid cloud and multicloud environments, allowing customers to train models with preexisting infrastructure "where the data lives."

Arc-enabled Kubernetes came out in the fall, in-preview, and is now generally available. As part of the offering, developers can centralize coding and deploy cloud-native apps to Kubernetes clusters with GitOps.