People, Process, and Technology to continually provide value to customers.
While adopting DevOps practices automates and optimizes processes through technology, it all starts with the culture inside the organization—and the people who play a part in it. The challenge of cultivating a DevOps culture requires deep changes in the way people work and collaborate. But when organizations commit to a DevOps culture, they can create the environment for high-performing teams to develop.
My name is James van den Berg and I’m a MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management on my DevOps journey as an IT Infrastructure Guy managing datacenters on-prem and in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Today It’s not only a Virtual Machine or a Website to deploy for your customers, it’s much more then that like :
Time to market, deploy your solution fast without waiting on dependencies because you automated your process with a CI CD Pipeline.
Security and Monitoring to keep you in Controle.
Working together with different Teams who are each responsible for a part of the solution.
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Microsoft Azure Arc Servers On-Premises and Azure Cloud Services
Earlier I wrote a blogpost about Microsoft Azure Arc services installation to manage on-premises Servers with Azure Cloud Services, like Azure Monitor and Azure Security Centre from the Cloud.
Here in this post you will see the Newest Microsoft Azure Cloud Services to Manage and Monitor your Servers on-premises with security and compliance included.
Azure Arc Extensions settings of the Server.
Here you can see we have installed the Microsoft Monitoring Agent for Azure Monitor and log analytics, second we have installed the dependency Agent for Windows for
insights, Performance and Service maps. Here you find more information about Virtual machine extension management with Azure Arc for servers (preview)
After initial deployment of the Azure Arc for servers (preview) Connected Machine agent for Windows or Linux, you may need to reconfigure the agent, upgrade it, or remove it from the computer if it has reached the retirement stage in its lifecycle. You can easily manage these routine maintenance tasks manually or through automation, which reduces both operational error and expenses.
The Azure Arc Insights Performance monitor is there by default and installed with the following dashboards :
CPU Utilization
Available Memory
Logical disk IOPS
Logical disk MB/s
Logical disk Latency
Max logical disk used %
Bytes Sent Rate
Bytes Received Rate
Azure Arc Logs Analytics
Of course you can make your own custom Dashboards in the Azure Portal with your own triggers, so in this way you get the same Azure Monitor Innovative Tools for your On-Premises Servers. 😉
Within Microsoft Azure Arc Insights, you can also see a Service Map of the Server
Here is were the dependency agent comes in, you get a service map of the Server and see the communication lines with other resources. In this picture you see Server Yoda01 a Domain Controller of my MVPLAB.
You can see that there are three Clients are logged on the domain controller.
Microsoft Azure Security Center for Azure Arc Servers
One of the most powerful and important features of Microsoft Azure Cloud platform is Security! Microsoft Azure Security Center (ASC) is a unified infrastructure security management system that strengthens the security posture of your data centers, and provides advanced threat protection across your hybrid workloads in the cloud – whether they’re in Azure or not – as well as on premises.
Here you see my Azure Arc Servers (On-Premises) in Azure Security Center.
Azure Arc Server in Azure Security Center recommendations Summary
Five security assessments passed the test, but Azure Security assessment has two recommendations one is Medium Risk and one low.
Here you see the Security advise and the Remediation to take action on your Server.
Microsoft Azure Security Center Overview with the Overall Secure Score.
Security controls – Each control is a logical group of related security recommendations, and reflects your vulnerable attack surfaces. A control is a set of security recommendations, with instructions that help you implement those recommendations. Your score only improves when you remediate all of the recommendations for a single resource within a control.
To immediately see how well your organization is securing each individual attack surface, review the scores for each security control.
To get your Azure Arc Servers (On-premises) complaint for the business and security, you can use Microsoft Azure Arc Policies
Azure Arc Policies to meet your Compliance state.
Conclusion
Microsoft is bringing Azure Cloud Power tools everywhere with Azure Arc Services to give you modern tools like Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center to keep you in control, Secure and Compliant for your business. Keep following Microsoft for Hybrid IT Management, because more awesome features are added every day in Microsoft Azure Cloud Services. Let’s start to get your Azure Security Score UP and UP 😉
Microsoft Windows Admin Center is a web based App working in your modern browser like Edge or Chrome to manage your datacenter infrastructure. You can download it here
You can manage Windows Servers, Windows10 Desktops, Clusters, Hyperconverged Clusters, Storage Spaces Direct and more in a Hybrid environment and that’s what I like.
My Servers can be on-premises or in the Cloud like Azure and will manage them with Windows Admin Center.
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Earlier I wrote a blogpost about Microsoft Azure Service Fabric Standalone Cluster for Dev testing. This was 5 – Node Azure Service Fabric Cluster locally installed, but now I like to have a bigger ASF Cluster on my
Windows Server 2019 for testing with Visual Studio.
Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices and containers.
When you want to great your own Azure Service Fabric Cluster for Production, you have to prepare your self and making a plan before you build.
When you have your Azure Service Fabric Standalone Cluster running, you want to deploy your microservices, apps or containers on it and test your solution. In the following steps I deploy with Visual Studio a Web App to Azure Service Fabric Cluster Standalone version 7.1.409
