Introducing ArcBox 3.0 General Availability

Today, the Arc Jumpstart team is excited to announce the general availability of ArcBox 3.0!

Since it was first introduced in 2021, ArcBox has been our most deployed product and widely used by our field sellers and the Jumpstart community. ArcBox remains an invaluable resource for IT professionals, DataOps teams, and DevOps practitioners, providing comprehensive solutions to evaluate how to deploy, manage, and operate Arc-enabled environments.

Jam-packed release

In this jam-packed release, we wanted to address some of the biggest pain points our users shared their feedback on and take our time with the design. We prioritized ease of deployment, reliability, security, troubleshooting experience, and the footprint of the environment among other implementations and concepts as well as additional Arc-related features.

• Cost reduction on all three flavors of ArcBox
• Automatic Logon to the Client VM - no need for the user to interactively log in to ArcBox Client VM anymore for the Jumpstart automation to complete.
• Enchanted security posture by removing the Service Principal Names (SPN) user requirement in favor of Managed Identity at deployment time.
• Switching from Chocolatey to WinGet as the solution package manager. WinGet, Microsoft's command-line package manager for Windows, is now included in ArcBox to streamline software installation and management.
• PowerShell 7 is now the default scripting language for running our automation scripts, allowing us to host modern features and improvements that significantly enhance the efficiency, performance, and reliability of our automation processes compared to the traditional Windows PowerShell.
• PowerShell 7 also introduces several performance enhancements, including the Foreach-Object -Parallel command, which enables parallel execution of script blocks.
• Introducing Declarative Configurations based on PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) for more reliable and consistent automation.
• Introducing a new set of comprehensive Integration tests for infrastructure validation using Pester.
• Added modularization functionalities for the Logon-Script with PowerShell modules, allowing for an easier contribution and troubleshooting experiance.
• As we continue to invest in the Bicep language for deploying infrastructure to Azure, ArcBox now includes sample Bicep parameter files, replacing former JSON parameter files, for a more streamlined and readable infrastructure-as-code experience. Bicep parameters simplify the creation and management of Azure Resource Manager templates, making infrastructure-as-code more intuitive and less error-prone.
• Updates Windows and Ubuntu VHD images.
• Azure Update Manager experience.
• Modernized Azure Monitor Workbooks for enhanced monitoring and visualization capabilities for IT professionals
• PowerShell remoting over SSH is available for Windows and Linux machines.
• SSH for Arc-enabled servers - SSH-based PowerShell remoting connections to Arc-enabled servers without requiring a public IP address or additional open ports.
• SSH Posture Control (auto configure via Azure Policy) - audit and configure SSH Server security posture on supported Linux distros including Ubuntu, Red Hat, Azure Linux, and more.
• On-demand SQL Migration Assessment experience, providing detailed evaluations for migrating SQL databases to Azure.
• ArcBox has now transitioned from using Cluster API (CAPI) and the Cluster API Provider Azure (CAPZ) to k3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution, for managing Kubernetes clusters. By switching to k3s, DevOps teams benefit from a more lightweight, efficient, and easier-to-manage Kubernetes solution, reducing overhead and improving performance in resource-constrained environments.
• ArcBox now includes Istio, a powerful service mesh, to facilitate blue/green deployments and load balancing. Previously, ArcBox used Open Service Mesh (OSM) to demonstrate traffic splitting; however, in May of 2023, OSM was archived.

ArcBox flavors

In this release, we decided to deprecate the good old “Full” flavor of ArcBox. To keep things consistent and easier to maintain, while keeping the core experience for every user profile, we invested in making multiple improvements and optimizations to the existing “ITPros”, “DevOps”, and “DateOps” ArcBox flavors.

Cost

Cost efficiency is always a top priority for us! We are happy to share that ArcBox is now cheaper than ever, showing great progress from previous versions.

Getting started

ArcBox 3.0 represents a significant milestone in the evolution of the Arc Jumpstart, bringing a host of new features and improvements that enhance usability, performance, and functionality across various domains, underscores our commitment to delivering cutting-edge solutions that meet the evolving needs of IT professionals, DataOps teams, and DevOps practitioners.

Watch our release announcement episode of Jumpstart Lightning and get started today by visiting aka.ms/JumpstartArcBox!