Explore New Functionality for Kyndryl’s Distributed Cloud Offering

A few months ago, I wrote a blog about the evolution of distributed cloud and how yesterday’s distributed computing became today’s more efficient cloud operating model. 

Benefits of a Distributed Cloud Operating Model

In today’s distributed cloud model, you run public cloud infrastructure in multiple locations, which can be anywhere in the world, as opposed to a traditional centrally located public cloud. 

The key elements reside with single-pane-of-glass management that is delivered by a public cloud provider, and the ability to manage federated resources whether they are in other public clouds, on-premises, remote locations, or edge deployments. A distributed cloud model tends to be less complex—and more attractive to the business in terms of ROI—than a hybrid or multicloud environment.

Kyndryl Distributed Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI with Azure Arc

To address customer demand for distributed cloud and edge computing, we announced a fully managed offering called the Kyndryl Distributed Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI with Azure Arc. This integrated system consists of Microsoft-certified hardware and Azure cloud software, purpose-built with full-stack lifecycle management and native Azure integration. This month, we are providing valuable enhancements to the offering, including support for SQL Server, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Azure Arc−enabled vSphere. 

New Enhancements for Microservices Environments with Azure Arc-Enabled SQL Managed Instance and AKS

First, let’s talk about Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance and how you can use our AKS capability with SQL Managed Instance to build a microservices application development environment in a hybrid cloud. Likedistributed cloud, the concept of microservices has been around for quite some time—dating back as early as 2005; however, in its current form, it is relatively new. A microservice architecture is a model that arranges an application into segments of smaller, loosely coupled, fine-grained parts or services that communicate through APIs. In contrast, traditionally, applications were monolithic, meaning they were comprised of modules that collaborated to form one self-contained program from a single platform. This is fine unless the application must scale. When a monolithic application scales, it can become too complex to maintain, manage, and test, which can introduce errors that undermine its reliability.

Microservices have become extremely popular in the last few years. According to Statista, 85% of large organizations were using microservices in 2021. Microservices are more agile—increasing the rollout speed, scalability, and testing associated with application development—and are a great fit for cloud. 

By combining SQL Managed Instance with AKS, you can create microservice hybrid cloud application dev/test environments in Azure and run production workloads on-premises. Below is a Microsoft architectural diagram depicting a microservices environment that connects to an external database service, such as SQL Server or Azure Cosmos DB. This is a good example of how containers provide developers with the flexibility to choose database technologies that best suit the application.

You can also create a hybrid data management environment with Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance on-premises that connects to other Azure data management or analytics workloads, such as Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure Data Warehouse, Azure Synapse Analytics, or Microsoft Power BI. This provides you with seamless access, sharing, and analysis for all types of data, regardless of its structure or storage type.

A common example would be an application that uses Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance for read-write workloads while offloading read-only workloads to SQL Managed Instance in any Azure region worldwide. Once the link is established, the primary database on Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance is read-write accessible while replicated data to SQL Managed Instance in Azure is read-only accessible. This allows for various scenarios where replicated databases on SQL Managed Instance can be used for readscale-out and offloading read-only workloads to Azure. SQL Managed Instance, in parallel, can also host independent read-write databases. This allows for copying of the replicated database to another read-write database on the same managed instance for further data processing.

Centralized and Secure Management for Azure Virtual Desktop

Next, let’s talk virtual desktop infrastructure, which has become the standard for remote and branch-office workers. VDI software hosts desktop environments on a centralized server—either on-premises or in the cloud—and delivers the virtual image to the remote user’s desktop as if it were hosted locally. You can leverage your Azure Stack HCI investment to deliver centralized, highly available, and simplified management for the users in your organization, including application developers, through Azure Virtual Desktop. In addition to being a highly secure environment, Azure Virtual Desktop gives developers the flexibility to work from any device anywhere. 

The technology and telecommunications verticals hold the largest VDI share; however, healthcare is expected to grow at the highest rate due to organizations looking for better management and security options for end-user-computing. With modern cloud-based VDI, you gain significant business value in the form of improved operational costs, data security, employee productivity, disaster recovery, and performance for power users.

This offering supports two VDI use cases: non-graphical-intensive VDI for traditional thin-client workloads, and because the need for GPU support in VDI deployments is rapidly increasing, we’re also supporting GPU-based VDI for graphically intensive workloads, such as media creation and rendering. In collaboration with the Kyndryl Digital Workplace team, Kyndryl Private Cloud is able to deliver an end-to-end Azure Virtual Desktop solution.

Azure Arc-Enabled vSphere Support

Lastly, let’s talk about our support for Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere. Microsoft recently announced general availability of vSphere support through Arc, so VMware customers can extend Azure governance to vSphere infrastructure and get unified single-pane-of-glass management capabilities. VMware customers can now perform VM lifecycle functions, including creating, starting/stopping, resizing, and deleting VMs, directly from Azure, and developers can self-serve VM operations on demand, using Azure role-based access control. 

Kyndryl for Your Distributed Cloud Needs

Remember that Kyndryl provides a variety of services to increase value across your modernization journey, including implementation of incremental Azure Stack features or workloads, such as backup and containers. If you would like more information on our Azure Stack HCI offering, or to request an engagement, reach out to your Kyndryl account team or submit an online request.