Microsoft expanded the depth of its Azure Arc platform with new capabilities that can expand user management and developer efficiency to rival cloud offerings from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and continuing to develop a service mesh platform offering an alternative to the oversight-confused Istio platform.

The Azure Arc update allows users to run Azure application services on top of any Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-conformant Kubernetes cluster and connect across different environments. Those Azure application services include the fully managed Azure App Service, the serverless-focused Azure Functions platform, the Azure Logic Apps automate workflows, Azure Event Grid for even-based applications, and the Azure API Management platform.

The integration is designed to make it quicker for developers to construct hybrid applications that can then be run in various environments and manage them from a single dashboard. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella noted in his keynote speech at this week’s Build 2021 event that “this means you can now run your favorite Azure application services on premise, on the edge, or other clouds,” and that it can be tied to Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Stack HCI for a quick deployment workflow.

Nick McQuire, chief of enterprise research at CCS Insight, noted in an email to SDxCentral that the update “will be welcome news for customers as the demand for greater integrations between its investments in Kubernetes along with its Azure services, Azure Stack infrastructure, and the Azure Arc control plane continue to rise.”

“We expect that in the next few years, over 40% of large firms will continue to run more than 40% of their IT workloads on premises, which means that the role of Azure Arc continues to be fundamental for Microsoft’s future in addressing this complexity and its long-term fortunes in cloud computing as well,” McQuire added.

The platform is in preview and builds on the general availability launch of the Azure Arch enabled Kubernetes platform earlier this year. That platform allows users to manage Kubernetes clusters across different infrastructure environments.

As McQuire noted, Azure Arc is becoming an increasingly important part of Microsoft’s cloud strategy. The vendor unveiled the platform in late 2019, touting it as a way to extend the Azure control plane across rival cloud provider and on-premises locations. 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.

Hyperscale rivals AWS and Google both offer a similar platform in their Outposts and Anthos offerings, respectively.

Furthering its cloud-native ambitions, Microsoft also moved its Open Service Mesh (OSM) platform into preview. The product can now be tied to the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters to support the building of extensible distributed applications across data center, edge, and multi-cloud environments. The integration can also secure dynamic microservice environments on those clusters through onboarding on a single cluster or applying policy to onboard multiple clusters at scale.

OSM was unveiled last year, building on Microsoft’s Service Mesh Interface (SMI) initiative. Michelle Noorali, a senior software engineer at Microsoft, at that time explained that OSM provides a “lightweight and extensible service mesh that runs on Kubernetes.” It provides a control plane that is compatible with the SMI specification, and it taps the widely used Envoy proxy for the data plane.

That initial OSM unveiling came just weeks after Google made a controversial hosting decision for its Istio service mesh platform. That move was to house Istio within its newly developed Open Usage Commons (OUC) group instead of in the CNCF, which many had expected.

The project has since been active in attempting to assuage backers that it remains the control plane layer of choice. And those efforts seem to be paying off as a recent CNCF user survey found that Istio remained the service mesh of choice.