The 12 Days of Azure Arc-Mas: Day 4 - Four Nodes Connecting

On the fourth day of Azure Arc-Mas, Azure offered me: Four Nodes Connecting, bringing together a variety of choices for infrastructure selecting.

Day 4: Flexible Infrastructure and Connectivity

Azure Arc’s fourth gift to us is the power of connection — linking diverse infrastructures from the conventional to the cutting-edge, and ensuring that whether it’s Windows Server, Linux, VMware vSphere, or Azure Stack HCI, your nodes are all part of the same, seamlessly managed ecosystem.

The 12 Days of Azure Arc-Mas: Day 3 - Three Services Scaling

On the third day of Azure Arc-Mas, Azure gifted me: Three Services Scaling, with Azure SQL and PostgreSQL providing no downtime feeling.

Day 3: Data Insights - Azure Arc for Data Services

Azure Arc celebrates the season by bringing the robustness of Azure data services directly to Kubernetes clusters, regardless of their location. Imagine Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure Database for PostgreSQL, not just housed within Azure but anywhere you require – without missing a beat.

The 12 Days of Azure Arc-Mas: Day 2 - Two Cluster Flexing

On the second day of Azure Arc-Mas, Azure sent to me: Two Clusters Flexing, managed from Azure, yet running so free.

Embracing Duality: Kubernetes Clusters and Azure Data Services

Azure Arc brings duality and harmony between Kubernetes clusters and Azure data services, offering a seamless operational experience that’s both managed from Azure and capable of running anywhere.

Azure Arc’s Key Messages:

• Consistent Development and Operations: Azure Arc fosters uniform development and operations of cloud-native applications across any Kubernetes environment.
• Flexible Management: Manage your clusters and services from Azure, irrespective of their physical location.

Day 2 Focus: Two Types of Clusters

Azure Arc’s Integration with Kubernetes and Azure Data Services:

The 12 Days of Azure Arc-Mas: Day 1 - Centralized Management

On the first day of Azure Arc-Mas, Azure granted me: A Console in a Cloud Tree.

Single Control Plane Across Environments

Azure Arc is like the partridge in a pear tree at the heart of your environment’s management, extending the familiar Azure services to wherever your resources reside. It simplifies the complex, multi-faceted nature of modern IT landscapes by offering a unified management experience, enabling you to view and manage your resources irrespective of their physical or cloud location.

Introducing The 12 Days of Azure Arc-Mas: A Festive Journey Through Cloud Management

Happy Holidays, tech enthusiasts! 🎄 As we count down to the end of the year, I’m excited to bring you a special gift: “The 12 Days of Azure Arc-Mas.” This series is inspired by the classic carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” with a tech twist that celebrates the gifts Azure Arc delivers to IT professionals each day. This is a fun series that will be very high level. Depending on my response I may dig deeper into sections later this year.

The The Festive Tech Calendar is a free, month-long, fun tech event that takes place throughout December. The event features new content from different communities and people around the globe. The event is organized by Cloud Family and is aimed at people from all communities who want to participate in a fun and engaging session that is a bit different from a normal conference. On the 6th of December I did a session called “The 12 Days of Azure Arc-Mas.” The link to the video is below. If you are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area (Texas), I will be doing a DFWSMUG Edition of this session as well at the Winter Meet up on December 14th!

In this blog series I plan to blog about everything I know about Azure Stack HCI. So, it should be a very short blog series. Just kidding. Again, I tend to blog about subjects that I am currently working on or will be currently working on. So, Azure Stack HCI is fresh on my mind again these days.

I have decided to end this blog series but not end blogging about Azure Stack HCI. For those that don’t know, Azure Stack HCI 23H2 Preview has been released. The GA date isn’t officially published yet. However, I feel blogging about release 22H2 will be a mute point now with some of the major changes coming in release 23H2.

In this blog series I plan to blog about everything I know about Azure Stack HCI. So, it should be a very short blog series. Just kidding. Again, I tend to blog about subjects that I am currently working on or will be currently working on. So, Azure Stack HCI is fresh on my mind again these days.

I now have Azure Stack HCI cluster deployed. We can manage it using Windows Admin Center or PowerShell. In later blogs I will go into how to us Azure Arc services to manage our workloads that we will deploy on our cluster. This blog I want to focus on deploying Azure Kubernetes Service and deploying an AKS host on my HCI cluster. This will enable my me to deploy Kubernetes clusters for various workloads later.

In this blog series I plan to blog about everything I know about Azure Stack HCI. So, it should be a very short blog series. Just kidding. Again, I tend to blog about subjects that I am currently working on or will be currently working on. So, Azure Stack HCI is fresh on my mind again these days.

My last blog Azure Stack HCI - Part VII - Configure Windows Admin Center Access, was actually all about Windows Admin Center and nothing really about Azure Stack HCI. However, this blog is going to be focused on using Windows Admin Center for Azure (Preview) to manage our Azure Stack HCI clusters from anywhere without a VPN or a direct connection. So go get some coffee so I don’t put you to sleep.

In this blog series I plan to blog about everything I know about Azure Stack HCI. So, it should be a very short blog series. Just kidding. Again, I tend to blog about subjects that I am currently working on or will be currently working on. So, Azure Stack HCI is fresh on my mind again these days.

So this blog, which I hope will be short, will be about how to secure your access to the Windows Admin Center that is being used to manage your Azure Stack HCI cluster. I will be honest, up until right before I just created this blog, I never really gave any thought to this. Well, maybe some thought but since I don’t really use WAC a lot, I never saw it as a need in my environment. Plus, I am the only one who has access to my lab environment anyway. (That I am aware of!)