Microsoft is expanding the reach of its Arc hybrid-cloud platform to Red Hat’s Kubernetes-focused OpenShift and Enterprise Linux (RHEL) environments to simplify the management of applications running across those platforms.

Arpan Shah, GM for Microsoft Azure, explained in a blog post that the expansion will allow users to manage OpenShift clusters running on Azure or on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), virtual machines (VMs), or on-premises bare metal. Those clusters can be deployed using Azure Policy and Arc straight from Github repositories.

They can also use Arc to run Azure data services on OpenShift on-premises, at the edge, in multi-cloud environments, and Microsoft’s SQL Big Data Cluster for elastic scaling of data within an OpenShift and RHEL environment.

Scott Guthrie, EVP for Microsoft’s Cloud and AI Group, explained during a keynote address at this week’s Red Hat Summit 2020 Virtual Experience that the move answers customer demand for a simplified way of managing their Microsoft Azure and Red Hat deployments.

“Our customers have said they want to use a single pane of glass and take advantage of cloud-era scale economies and scale services that we provide in Azure across their environments,” Guthrie said. “You can now use a single pane of glass to manage your VMs, manage your Kubernetes clusters, manage your databases and stand those up and apply policy and security, inventory tagging and searching at scale fully integrated into Red Hat capabilities and Azure.

As for the expanded SQL support, Guthrie noted that this will allow for data management to be moved up the stack from just infrastructure to Azure data services like its SQL Database service.

Microsoft also announced general availability of its Azure Red Hat OpenShift on OpenShift 4 platform that, in addition to needing a shorter name, also ties in the OpenShift 4 updates. Those include Red Hat’s Certified Operators framework that basically acts as a controller that runs Kubernetes for a particular application. It does this by using the Kubernetes API to handle the creation and management of application instances. Within OpenShift, Operators allow for on-demand provisioning of application services and provide build-and-deploy automation for containerized applications.

That update also included Red Hat’s CodeReady Workspaces that allow developers to bridge the gap between containers, Kubernetes, and their own familiar work environments; and the OpenShift Service Mesh that combines Istio, Jaeger, and Kiali projects as a single product.

The GA move builds on the launch of Microsoft's Azure Red Hat OpenShift last year. Microsoft was the first public cloud platform supported by the OpenShift 4 release, and it allowed enterprises to run container-based workloads using OpenShift on Azure.

Microsoft launched Arc at its Ignite event last fall. It allows Microsoft customers to manage their data and applications that reside on either its Azure cloud or public cloud offerings from rivals like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud. That cross-cloud management includes data and services running in virtual machines (VMs), containers, or Kubernetes, and also allows enterprises to enforce a single security posture across those data sources or applications.

Arc competes against rival platforms like Google’s Anthos and AWS’ Outposts.