Disconnected operations for Azure Local

At long last Microsoft has announced that Azure Local expands to sovereign-scale infrastructure with disaggregated deployments. Given how many times their on-premises cloudy offerings change names, hopefully we'll get a shorter name than "disconnected operations for Azure Local" (doAL).

General availability is long overdue and has the potential to help close the gap to Nutanix, Red Hat and VMware (among others).

Key use cases are likely to include:

1. Remote locations: This deployment allows organisations to run workloads and utilise Azure Arc services without relying on active internet connectivity. Because network latency and reliability are frequent showstoppers for cloud adoption, this is a major win for sizable edge environments.

Is it overkill for small remote locations? Yes.

Why? doAL has a minimum of 3 nodes each requiring 512 GB memory, 24 cores and 8 that must be at least 2TB each. This beefy hardware footprint underscores the ongoing market need for traditional Windows Server deployments or non-Microsoft alternatives (<cough> Linux <cough>).

2. High control / compliance: This addresses regulated industries, legislative mandates, high control and (some) sovereign infrastructure requirements. Virtified groups these together, and avoids buzzwords along the way, because they are effectively variations on the same theme...regardless of what most vendor marketing would have you believe. For the sovereign use case, digital public goods such as SUSE will tick more boxes (outside USA).

3. Next-generation workloads: This includes emerging distributed, private, and local AI architecture—which is more accurately termed inference. The notable exception, for now, is bundled containers and native Kubernetes capabilities. No doubt this will be resolved before long, given that this functionality has been available from Microsoft elsewhere.

Connected versus disconnected (source: Microsoft)

Supported Azure services

As at the time of publishing, the offering only supports these Azure services. It doesn't need to support all but it needs to deliver key management and reliable capability in a secure manner. From a management perspective, doAL includes Azure portal, Azure Arc, Azure Portal, Azure PowerShell and Azure Resource Manager (ARM). Of most note is Azure Local VMs. Notably absent at announcement was 'Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) enabled by Arc for Azure Local', which is in preview (hence not considered by Virtified as being ready).

In coming weeks, Virtified will published a Virtified Loop that evaluates disconnected operations for Azure Local. We will explore the gamut of inclusions and exclusions in detail.

Pricing and licensing

Although $10 / core / month sounds appealing it's all the add-ons that will hurt (Azure Arc: $6 / core / month; Microsoft Defender for Servers $4.90 - $14.60 / server / month).

Note: above prices are Central US region.

Azure hybrid benefit may an option and you'll need a Microsoft Customer Agreement for enterprise (MCA-E). After that, you will need to fill in a form and meet one of the following criteria (or similar in the discretion of Microsoft):  zero / limited connectivity to the internet, "sovereign requirements", strict regulations or restrictions prohibiting sending any kind of data back to the cloud.

As with most Microsoft products and services, pricing remains a mystery beyond the capability of Virtified.

Seek expert Microsoft licensing advice. Always.

Note: Don't forget hardware.