Background

Red Hat and Microsoft have business alignment on the need for Azure ARC support. Microsoft wants Azure to manage infrastructure in or outside of the cloud, and Red Hat wants to be able to automate deployment and configuration of that infrastructure. Azure ARC is a pillar of Microsoft’s 2022 Azure strategy, and Red Hat can benefit from Microsoft technological and business partnerships by supporting ARC.

Azure Arc support for virtual machine management over SSH is the first area in which this business alignment will happen. Microsoft desires the ability to bring VM management under support of the Azure umbrella through Arc, and Red Hat wants to enable the connectivity and automation of those connected VMs through Arc as if the nodes are directly routable.

Business impact: microsoft + redhat alignment on external resource host management. How? Microsoft wants to bring VM management under Arc, and Red Hat is trying to enable automating that management under Arc.

Story

As an Ansible on Azure customer I can connect to and automate against virtual machines connected to Azure via Azure Arc through Arc support of SSH as if the host were directly routable and could be automated against like a native host in AAP in order for me to be able to use AAP for my VM configuration management through my Arc server inventory.