Microsoft has a solution for the virtual machine management blues.
As professionals know, when you spin up any significantly sized distributed virtual network, you need ways to manage individual VMs, tweaking configurations and installing patches, and making sure that small iterative tasks are consistently applied.
Now, Microsoft is delivering a key addition to its Azure cloud service called Azure Automanage that can automate a lot of this work for client engineers, or anyone else who’s worried about effective and efficient virtual machine handling.
MS Azure Automanage helps with boot diagnostics, backup, log analysis, configuration and update management and more. It works at an operating system level, and it works with both Linux and Windows machines.
Reporting by Simon Bisson at TechRepublic reveals that registered servers are immediately added to the support network in order to make architectures consistent across the board.
To set an initial standard, MS Azure Automanage uses the baseline configuration for Azure’s Cloud Adoption Framework. It also makes use of something called the Azure Desired State Configuration Module, in a display of jargon that shows readers that virtualization semantics can be hard to decipher. Here’s how Microsoft describes its “desired state configuration extension handler:”
“The primary use case for the Azure Desired State Configuration (DSC) extension is to bootstrap a VM to the Azure Automation State Configuration (DSC) service. The service provides benefits that include ongoing management of the VM configuration and integration with other operational tools, such as Azure Monitoring. Using the extension to register VM’s to the service provides a flexible solution that even works across Azure subscriptions.”
The bottom line is that developers and engineers can rely on these kinds of automated systems to help them to effectively manage virtual networks, even with virtual machine sprawl, where the number of individual servers becomes more than a given team can easily micromanage manually.
Why does this matter to technology investors? Well, because Microsoft, with the largest market cap around, dominates the tech world in more ways than one. At the same time, it has a lot of strong competition from other massive tech firms including Google and Apple.
We’ve been looking at the cloud wars for some time, and Microsoft’s move adds to the growing list of automation opportunities for these kinds of complex virtual constructions. Look for the effects in related markets.
