Azure Monitor

“But what about all the cloud stuff Azure Local gets?”

It’s the first objection every decision-maker raises when you propose traditional Hyper-V over Azure Local. Azure Local comes with AKS, Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Portal VM management, Azure Monitor, Azure Update Manager, Defender for Cloud , all integrated. How do you compete with that on standalone Hyper-V?

The answer: you don’t need Azure Local to get most of those services. Azure Arc brings much of the same Azure management plane to your existing Hyper-V infrastructure , selectively, incrementally, and without taking on the Azure Local platform fee just to reach the Azure control plane. You pick the services that add value. You skip the ones that don’t. You keep control over where the monthly bill starts.

You built the cluster. You connected the storage. You migrated the VMs. Everything’s running.

Now how do you know it’s healthy at 3am?

Moving from “it works in the lab” to “it runs in production” isn’t about adding more VMs. It’s about proving your environment is healthy, knowing when it’s not, and understanding why before your users file a ticket. That requires observability , not a dashboard you glance at, but a system that collects, correlates, and alerts on the data your infrastructure produces.

This is next blog in a series of blogs I just started that share my experiences with integrating Azure services with my on-premises deployment of MicroK8s Kubernetes cluster running in WSL. These blog series are an extension of another blog series I did called MicroK8S and WSL Managed by Azure Arc.

At a high level there is a lot of Azure Services we can integrate and use with our Kubernetes clusters running anywhere, such as on-premises, or even GCP and AWS. As long as we can manage them using Azure Arc there is a good number of Azure tools and services we now have access to. Here is a short list of things I will try to blog about here: