The advantages of Azure Arc are:

• Azure arc eliminates the need to use numerous tools and dashboards which can be inefficient and inconvenient. Instead, it allows in consolidating management of resources under Azure Dashboard for Unified management across cloud, on-premises, and edge.
• Azure offers unlimited scalability by harnessing the power of cloud automation working with Azure Arc. We can scale up new instances as well as scale workloads in lesser time based on capacity.
• Azure security with the likes of Azure Security Center and Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) protecting workloads is extended to on-premises and edge workloads.

Azure Arc simplifies governance and management by offering a stable multi-cloud and on-premises management platform. Azure Arc also enables us to manage entire environment by projecting existing non-Azure, on-premises, or other-cloud resources into Azure Resource Manager (ARM), Manage virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and databases as if they are running in Azure and use familiar Azure services and management capabilities, regardless of where they reside.

Azure Arc allows us to manage the following resource types hosted outside of Azure:

• Servers – both physical and virtual machines running Windows or Linux.
• Kubernetes clusters – supporting multiple Kubernetes distributions.
• Databases (Azure data services) – Azure SQL database and PostgreSQL Hyperscale services.

AZURE ARC-ENABLED SERVERS

Azure Arc-enabled servers enables to manage Windows and Linux physical servers and virtual machines hosted outside of Azure, on corporate network, or other cloud provider. This management experience is designed to be in harmony with how you manage native Azure VMs. When a hybrid machine is connected to Azure, it becomes a connected machine and is treated as a resource in Azure. Each connected machine has a Resource ID enabling the machine to be included in a resource group.

Azure Arc-enabled servers provides:

• The flexibility to work for both Linux and Windows, Works with virtual machines (VMs), and other clouds and is also Domain-agnostic.
• At a management level, it has a searchable inventory at scale, offering the same server management experience across environments and consistent VM Extensions for agent management.
• For Governance and security, it has built-in Azure policies for servers, server security baselines with an ability to view and search for noncompliant servers across environments and advanced data security.
• A role-based access control with Central IT–based, at-scale operations and is Integrated with Azure Lighthouse for managed service providers.

AZURE ARC-ENABLED KUBERNETES

With Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes, businesses can configure Kubernetes clusters either inside or outside Microsoft Azure. When administrators connect their Kubernetes clusters into Azure Arc, administrators can see the K8s clusters in the Azure Resource Manager like a native Azure resource, including ARM ID. The Kubernetes resources are then placed in the Azure subscription and resource group and can be configured with tags and other metadata like other native Azure resources.

Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes provides:

• Flexibility in terms of container platform of client’s choice, Out-of-the-box support for most CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation)–certified Kubernetes and Use across dev, test, and production Kubernetes clusters.
• At a management level, it helps Inventory, organize, and tag Kubernetes clusters, deploy apps and configuration as code using GitOps and Monitor and Manage at scale with policy-based deployment.
• Built-in Kubernetes Gatekeeper policies to apply consistent security configuration at scale, consistent cluster extensions for Azure monitoring, governance, security services, and more.
• Another significant benefit with Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters is implementing Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for Kubernetes with Central IT-based at-scale operations and Management by workload owner based on access privileges.

AZURE ARC-ENABLED DATA SERVICES

Azure Arc makes it possible to run Azure data services on-premises, at the edge, and in public clouds using Kubernetes and the infrastructure of your choice. Currently, the following Azure Arc-enabled data services are available:

• SQL Managed Instance
• PostgreSQL Hyperscale.

The benefits of Azure Arc-enabled data services are:

• Azure Arc-enabled data services such as Azure Arc-enabled SQL managed instance and Azure Arc-enabled PostgreSQL Hyperscale receive updates on a frequent basis including servicing patches and new features and hence always stays current.
• Database-as-a-service benefits including automation for setting up high availability and elastic scaling without application downtime. This capability gives data workloads an additional boost on capacity optimization, using unique scale-out reads and writes.
• Unified management with familiar tools such as the Azure portal, Azure Data Studio, and the Azure CLI and a modern cloud billing model for hybrid infrastructure.
• Azure Arc has a self-service provisioning and provides other cloud benefits such as fast deployment and automation at scale. Thanks to Kubernetes-based orchestration, you can deploy a database in seconds using either GUI or CLI tools.

In conclusion, Azure Arc is a great tool and solution from Microsoft to help consolidate the many control planes that often exist when dealing with cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. Using Azure Arc will help to bring all these resources under one umbrella of control and automation tools.

Control Tower is a service devised to aid organizations in AWS multi-account management within AWS cloud environments. Amazon added AWS Control Tower to address such issues and give admins the ability to manage multiple cloud accounts through one interface. It offers a very straightforward approach to set up and govern an AWS multi-account environment.

AWS Control Tower provides an effortless way called a landing zone for this purpose following all regulatory best practices. AWS Control Tower orchestrates the capacities of various other AWS services, including AWS Organizations, AWS Service Catalog, and AWS Single Sign-on, to build a landing zone. AWS Control Tower also establishes blueprints, which are policies a company’s accounts must stick to. The blueprints encapsulate workflows and best practices for identity and access management, security, monitoring, logging and so on. AWS customers can implement AWS Control Tower, extend authority into new or existing accounts, and gain visibility into their compliance status quickly. If you are building a new AWS environment, starting out on your journey to AWS or starting a new cloud initiative, Control Tower will help you get started quickly with governance and best practices built in.

AWS Control Tower has the following features:

• Landing zone – A landing zone is a well-architected, multi-account environment that is based on security and compliance best practices A landing zone can scale to fit the needs of an enterprise of any size.
• Guardrails – A guardrail is a high-level rule that provides ongoing governance for your entire AWS environment. Three categories of guidance apply to the two kinds (preventive and detective) Guardrails: Mandatory, Strongly recommended, or Elective.
• Account Factory – An Account Factory is a configurable account template that helps to standardize the provisioning of new accounts with pre-approved account configurations.
• Dashboard – The dashboard offers continuous oversight of your landing zone to your team of central cloud administrators.

Although a Control Tower can be the best answer for organizations that struggle to manage multiple cloud accounts, it is vital to understand the service’s limitations and let’s look at some best practices for multi-account management in AWS.

LIMITATIONS OF AWS CONTROL TOWER

Although the premise of AWS Control Tower is convincing, the service has notable constraints.

The primary concern is the overall requirement for new accounts. AWS Control Tower does not support existing accounts or sub-accounts presently, so companies that already use AWS will have to create/ re-create accounts from scratch to handle them through the Control Tower.

Each AWS service enforces its own usage limits — or quotas, as AWS calls them. There are also functional quotas in memory, timeouts, space allocated to environment variables, space for policies, burst concurrency, invocation frequency, payload size and more.

Some Amazon cloud services, or settings may not be fully compatible with AWS Control Tower, like AWS Organizations. Admins can establish permission guardrails in AWS Organizations, (Organizational Unit) OU’s created outside of any the service will not be supported by Control Tower. Thus, pre-existing OUs are not supported in AWS Control Tower.

One of the best approaches to implementing the AWS Control Tower is to start small with new account deployments and build your service use over time. It is not necessarily applicable for existing, large multi-account deployments.

MULTI-ACCOUNT BEST PRACTICES

Despite such management challenges, there are still significant best practices that can help to facilitate multi-account environments in Amazon’s cloud.

Selecting regions carefully

When consolidating multiple accounts through a tool such as AWS Control Tower, the selection of a “home” region is particularly important since the accounts generated through the tool will be created within the selected region. Since not every cloud service from amazon is available in all regions, it is better to create accounts in the regions where all services and resources required to deploy a workload is available. Creating accounts in multiple regions is also useful so that resources and workloads can be deployed closer to users.

Refine resources

Organizations that use and manage multiple account users and managers find it frustrating that resources and services available in one account might not be available in other accounts. It is the responsibility of the account admin to allow access to all the resources required to support the services and workloads under an account once its created. This reduces costs and limits attack vectors. It is vital to communicate those parameters to users of each account.

Some businesses choose to standardize a minimum suite of services to institute a common foundation of resources for all accounts, but the onus is on the account owners to outline what is or is not available.