With Azure Arc, Microsoft offers a service that allows its customers to run Azure in any Kubernetes environment, no matter where that container cluster is hosted. From Day One, Arc supported a wide range of use cases, but one feature that was sorely missing when it first launched was support for machine learning (ML). But one of the advantages of a tool like Arc is that it allows enterprises to run their workloads close to their data and today, that often means using that data to train ML models.
At its Ignite conference, Microsoft today announced that it bringing exactly this capability to Azure Arc with the addition of Azure Machine Learning to the set of Arc-enabled data services.
“By extending machine learning capabilities to hybrid and multicloud environments, customers can run training models where the data lives while leveraging existing infrastructure investments. This reduces data movement and network latency, while meeting security and compliance requirements,” Azure GM Arpan Shah writes in today’s announcement.
This new capability is now available to Arc customers.
In addition to bringing this new machine learning capability to Arc, Microsoft also today announced that Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes, which allows users to deploy standard Kubernetes configurations to their clusters anywhere, is now generally available.
Also new in this world of hybrid Azure services is support for Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI. That’s a mouthful, but Azure Stack HCI is Microsoft’s platform for running Azure on a set of standardized, hyperconverged hardware inside a customer’s datacenter. The idea pre-dates Azure Arc, but it remains a plausible alternative for enterprises who want to run Azure in their own data center and has continued support from vendors like Dell, Lenovo, HPE, Fujitsu and DataOn.
On the open-source side of Arc, Microsoft also today stressed that Arc is built to work with any Kubernetes distribution that is conformant to the standard of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and that it has worked with RedHat, Canonical, Rancher and now Nutanix to test and validate their Kubernetes implementations on Azure Arc.
