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Azure Arc is a bridge that extends the Azure platform to help you build applications and services with the flexibility to run across datacenters, at the edge, and in multicloud environments. It provides a centralized, unified way to manage your entire environment by projecting your existing on-premises, edge, and multicloud resources into Azure Resource Manager so you have a single control plane to manage, govern, and secure your VMs, databases, Kubernetes clusters, and other cloud resources. Azure Arc can also help you deploy both management and PaaS services into your environments, like Microsoft Defender for Cloud or Azure Kubernetes Service.
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Azure Arc works by connecting your on-premises, multicloud, and edge resources to Azure, which creates resources in Azure that represent the actual resources. This allows you to manage virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and databases as if they are running in Azure, using familiar Azure services and management capabilities, while the workload itself remains in its current environment. Azure Arc offers both agentless and agent-based connections.
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Azure Arc simplifies governance and management by delivering a consistent multicloud and on-premises management platform. It allows you to implement consistent inventory, management, governance, and security for servers across your environment, manage and govern Kubernetes clusters at scale, and run Azure data services on any Kubernetes environment as if it runs in Azure. You can also run traditional license-based products like SQL Server in a pay-as-you-go plan with Azure Arc.
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To get started with Azure Arc, check out Azure Arc Jumpstart, which comes with prebuilt scenarios and demo environments.
Azure Arc lets you manage Windows and Linux physical servers and virtual machines hosted outside of Azure on your corporate network or other cloud provider. The management of hybrid machines in Azure Arc is designed to be consistent with how you manage native Azure virtual machines, using standard Azure constructs such as Azure Policy and applying tags.
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Azure Arc–enabled Kubernetes works with any Kubernetes clusters certified by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This includes clusters running on other public cloud providers (such as GCP or AWS) and clusters running on your on-premises datacenter (such as VMware vSphere or Hyper-V). See a list of supported Kubernetes distributions.
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Azure Arc–enabled Kubernetes delivers configuration management and application deployment from Azure using GitOps. Take a tutorial.
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Azure Arc complies with many compliance certifications specific to global regions and countries, such as the US, the European Union, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, India, and others. Additionally, Azure Arc meets requirements for industries such as healthcare, government, finance, manufacturing, and other industries. See the full list of compliance offerings here in the Azure Portal compliance offerings center.
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In most cases, the location you select when you create the installation script should be the Azure region geographically closest to your machine's location. Data at rest is stored within the Azure geography containing the region you specify, which may also affect your choice of region if you have data residency requirements. For a list of supported regions with Azure Arc–enabled servers, see the Azure products by region page.
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Azure Arc is offered at no additional cost for basic management of Azure Arc–enabled servers and Kubernetes, though there are charges for add-on Azure management services such as our security and governance services. Most services are typically priced at a per-server, per-month rate. See the Azure Arc pricing page for more details.