ORLANDO, Florida – Microsoft tightened its embrace of the hybrid cloud world with its new Azure Arc platform that extends its Azure control plane across rival cloud provider and on-premises locations. The preview launch continues the broader industry push to help enterprises deal with “cloud sprawl.”

Azure Arc 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. It also continues Microsoft’s ongoing support of on-premises environments.

That cross-cloud management includes data and services running in virtual machines (VMs), containers, or Kubernetes. It also allows enterprises to enforce a single security posture across those data sources or applications.

Speaking during his “Vision Keynote” at this week’s Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella heavily hyped the product by stating it marked a “new era of hybrid computing where there is a control plane built for multi-cloud and multi-edge.”

Nadella also said that Azure Arc taps into a pair of open source projects Microsoft recently launched: Rudr and Dapr.

Rudr is Microsoft’s initial open implementation of the Open Application Model (OAM) project that Microsoft and Alibaba Cloud donated into the Open Web Foundation. OAM is a specification that separates an application description from the details on how that application is deployed or managed by infrastructure. Rudr is Microsoft’s iteration that is built on top of Kubernetes.

Dapr is an event-driven runtime that allows developers to build microservices that can run on any platform on the cloud or edge without any code changes. This allows those applications to run locally or on any Kubernetes cluster running in any environment.

Those two products contribute to the portability of applications running in Azure Arc.

Microsoft notes that Azure Arc builds on its Azure Resource Manager platform that was initially released in 2014. That platform allows customers to manage resources outside of Azure, including in an organization’s on-premises environment and on other clouds.

It’s also similar to Microsoft’s Azure Stack hybrid cloud platform that ties its Azure cloud into an organization’s on-premises data center. This allows applications that are developed in Azure Stack to run across any Azure environment.

More importantly for the market, Azure Arc operates similar to Google’s recently launched Anthos platform. Anthos, which Google unveiled earlier this year at its Next event, is a Kubernetes-based platform that is fully managed by Google and allows users to manage their data and applications in an on-premises environment or across cloud platforms from rivals like AWS and Microsoft.

AWS’ Outposts is that cloud provider's version of this model, though it has not yet announced compatibility plans across Azure or Google Cloud.