Announcing Landing Zone Accelerator for Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance

With both Azure Arc-enabled servers and Kubernetes Landing Zone Accelerators already generally available, today we're launching the Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance landing zone accelerator within the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework.

The new solution provides hybrid and Multicloud scenarios within the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework, a proven set of guidance designed by subject matter experts across Microsoft to help customers create and implement the business and technology strategies necessary to succeed in the cloud as well as a way to automate a fully deployed Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance environment, making implementation faster.

Here’s what Robert Badaracco, Associate Director of Architecture at KPMG had to say about the Accelerator - “Because of compliance and security policy restrictions for some of our clients, KPMG isn’t yet in a position to completely deploy databases and applications in public cloud systems like Azure. Exploring the potential to move databases and applications to a hybrid computing model using Azure Arc to leverage our current on-premises investments generated a lot of excitement with our application development teams. The ability to adapt and run Azure PaaS services, like Azure SQL Managed Instances, on our own infrastructure is very appealing and sets up the perfect migration path for databases and applications that eventually will move to the cloud. The benefits of running managed database instances that will always be current will lower the total cost of ownership and provide more redundancy, reliability, and efficiency for our applications. We completed a proof-of-concept using Azure Arc-enabled data services with a few on-premises applications that proved how easy it was to migrate application data from servers running SQL Server instances to Azure SQL MI’s running in an OpenShift distribution of Kubernetes. The documentation and guidance provided by Microsoft simplified this effort and aligned to our goals.”

Design areas within the landing zone accelerator

The Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance landing zone accelerator enables customers’ cloud adoption journey with considerations, recommendations, and architecture patterns most important to customers. For deploying Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance in the most recommended way, we created a set of nine critical design areas. Each of these specific areas walks customers through a set of design considerations, recommendations, architectures, and next steps:

• Identity and access management
• Network topology and connectivity
• Storage disciplines
• Resource organization
• Governance and security disciplines
• Management disciplines
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
• Upgradability disciplines
• Cost governance

Automation for landing zone accelerator

The Azure Arc landing zone accelerator uses the sandbox automation powered by Azure Arc Jumpstart as its reference implementation. Since launching more than 2 years ago, Azure Arc Jumpstart has grown to more than 120 automated scenarios, thousands of visitors a month, and a vivid open-source community sharing their learnings on Azure Arc. As part of Jumpstart, we developed ArcBox, an automated sandbox environment for all-things Azure Arc, deployed in customers’ Azure subscriptions.

For the Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance landing zone accelerator, we developed the new ArcBox for DataOps so our customers can automatically deploy and experiment with the technology.

ArcBox for DataOps is full of goodies and provides a complete experience. Simulation for disaster recovery, Active Directory authentication and authorization, Backup and Restore and so much more.

The sandbox automation supports Bicep, Terraform, and ARM templates, so customers can choose what makes sense to them and their organizations’ automation practices. This is also part of our continued investment in the ArcBox product line.

Getting started

Hop over to the Hybrid and multicloud Cloud Adoption Framework page and explore the Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance landing zone accelerator, the critical design areas, and sandbox automation.