Scott Guthrie’s 5 Boldest Remarks At Microsoft Build 2021

New Azure Capabilities For App Building

One of the things that’s great about Azure is the power of all the built-in developer capabilities that we deliver as a service on it. We have hundreds of services on Azure that you can take advantage of as a developer to build great applications. Things like web apps and serverless functions and Logic Apps you’re very familiar with, they’re used now by millions of developers around the world today.

Yesterday, we announced a preview of some great new set of Azure capabilities that are going to now allow you to take these same services that you’ve used inside Azure and build applications that can now use them and run anywhere whether it’s on Azure, across the on-premises environment including bare metal as well as VMware deployments, as well as even other clouds like AWS and GCP (Google Cloud Platform).

Any Kubernetes cluster around the world running in any environment can now be connected through what we call Azure Arc. You can now take advantage of these services on top of that cluster as well.

You can now innovate faster by using our built-in Azure application services and have this beautiful model where you can focus on your code and not have to worry about the underlying infrastructure that it’s running on top of.

This means you don’t have that kind of trade off productivity for portability. You can now run it everywhere. It also means you have a higher level set of capabilities that you can run on top of Kubernetes so you get some of the flexibility that Kubernetes provides, as well as the portability that it provides, but an even richer set of capabilities that enable you as a developer to build applications fast.

This also gives you a great way as a developer, to work with teams on the operation side to be able to run and monitor the applications in a multi-cloud approach. The power of all this is through something we call Azure Arc, which is a key element of our multi cloud hybrid strategy

What Azure Arc provides all up is this notion that you can go ahead and do cloud operations, anywhere for your cloud applications.

We’ve also announced — and now support — the ability to run, for example, our database services as well on top of Arc. The combination of all of this gives you just tremendous flexibility to again build solutions that ultimate portability can be used everywhere. With Azure Arc, you have a single pane of glass for management and operations and monitoring. You can apply Azure Policy and Governance controls as part of it. Azure Arc works with any CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation)-conformant Kubernetes cluster, which makes it possible to use Azure application services, data services and infrastructure services literally anywhere to accelerate your innovation faster.

I talked about cloud native apps and our developer tools. Obviously, one of the key ingredients of all of those apps is the data that they store and the AI that works against it. With Microsoft Azure and our overall cloud platform, we now provide an incredibly rich set of services and capabilities that enable you to do this.