SSH for Azure Arc is now generally available!

We are excited to share the general availability of SSH for Azure Arc which was released earlier this month. Remote management, and SSH specifically, is a critical tool for programmatic and interactive server administration. SSH for Azure Arc enables you to securely connect to any of your Azure Arc-enabled servers via SSH, without the need for a public IP address or additional inbound ports. This allows you to SSH into your Azure Arc-enabled servers via an Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell command.

Have existing OpenSSH based automation or tooling? SSH for Azure Arc is available to use with native SSH, SCP, SFTP, etc. by generating an SSH config file to connect to your desired machines. Just authenticate into your Windows or Linux machines as a local user with a username and password or SSH key, or login with your identity through Microsoft Entra ID (Linux only, Windows support coming soon).

We are committed to providing a consistent and secure experience across Azure resource types, operating systems, and authentication types. Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell provide consistent automation to manage both Azure Arc-enabled Servers and Azure IaaS VMs with the same commands, `az ssh vm` or `Enter-AzVM`. Ensuring that you can easily connect to your servers in a simplified and automatable manner.

With SSH for Azure Arc, there is no need to open additional inbound firewall ports or assign a public IP address to your machine, SSH traffic is sent over the existing connection between the Azure Arc agent and Azure. You can now access any of your machines, in any network, with one command, without exposing the machine to the internet.

Connect to your machines from any machine via the Azure portal and the new connect experience:

To learn more, view the latest documentation:

SSH access to Azure Arc-enabled servers overview