Thomas Maurer provides a practical, architect-focused walkthrough of Azure Local, covering hybrid cloud architecture, edge scenarios, digital sovereignty, security features, and workload management, with actionable demos and management techniques.

Azure Local Overview: Hybrid Cloud, Edge, and Sovereign Scenarios

Author: Thomas Maurer

Introduction

This video offers a condensed yet in-depth introduction to Azure Local, explaining why the service exists and how it integrates with modern hybrid cloud architectures. Geared toward architects, IT professionals, and cloud engineers, it demonstrates deployment and management of diverse workloads locally with Azure-level cloud control.

Key Topics Covered

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: How Azure Local enables organizations to run workloads both on-premises and in the cloud, maintaining a unified management plane and ensuring consistency across environments.
Edge Computing: Support for workloads that require low latency, local data processing, or operate in remote/disconnected scenarios.
Digital Sovereignty: Using Azure Local to meet compliance and regulatory requirements for data residency, while retaining access to Microsoft’s management and security features.
Disconnected and Resilient Operations: Operational strategies for scenarios where connectivity to public Azure is limited or intermittent.

Azure Local: Workload Examples

Virtual Machines: Both Windows and Linux VM provisioning and management.
Containers: Running containerized apps using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Azure Local.
Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD): Hosting virtual desktops on local infrastructure.
Databases: Local hosting and management of databases for latency-sensitive or sovereign workloads.
AI and Inference Workloads: (Mention of inference workloads, but no deep ML/AI process content.)
Other Platform Services: Overview of platform features available to edge and local deployments.

Management with Azure Portal

Detailed walkthroughs of managing Azure Local from the Azure portal, including:

Access to the control plane
Lifecycle operations: deployment, scaling, retiring
Security and monitoring setup (with Azure Defender and Azure Monitor)
Updates and high availability
Disaster Recovery and site management

Security Features

Integration with Azure Defender for Cloud for security posture and threat detection
Management of secrets and credentials
Consistent implementation of security policies across local and cloud workloads
Demonstrated features for high availability and disaster recovery

Additional Resources

Who Should Watch

This overview is valuable for architects, IT pros, and cloud engineers designing or managing hybrid, edge, or sovereign workload solutions with Microsoft Azure technology.

About the Author

Thomas Maurer is Microsoft’s EMEA Global Black Belt for Sovereign Cloud, specializing in hybrid, multicloud, and edge architectures. He regularly provides technical guidance to organizations deploying Microsoft cloud solutions across complex and regulated environments.

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