Today, we are thrilled to announce that Azure Local is now available for Azure Government customers in public preview. Building upon the earlier introduction of Azure Local, we are excited to bring this innovative solution to government agencies. Government customers benefit from the same user experience as they would in the Azure public cloud.

Azure Local enables organizations to deploy cloud-connected infrastructure at their own physical locations, under their operational control, while maintaining compliance with stringent regulations and security standards. This innovative approach empowers customers to leverage the benefits of Azure’s robust ecosystem—including compute, networking, storage, and application services—locally, while seamlessly integrating with broader cloud workflows.

Key Features of Azure Local

Deployment and Management Simplified

Azure Local instances can be deployed, configured, updated, and monitored using the Azure portal or infrastructure-as-code tools like ARM templates. This streamlines the process, making it predictable and repeatable while reducing IT operational costs and complexity.

Azure Local is now available for deployment in the US Gov Virginia region in preview. It provides a streamlined workflow in the Azure portal, allowing customers to configure clusters, networking, and storage to suit the unique requirements of their environments.

Azure Local integrates natively with Azure Monitor for unified observability across cloud resources and distributed locations, enabled by Azure Arc. You can monitor your distributed VMs, Kubernetes clusters, and physical infrastructure from a single pane of glass. Azure Local comes with 60+ standard Metrics, out-of-the-box Insights dashboards, and Alerts rules for the infrastructure stack. including creating virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters and performing cluster updates.

You can conveniently view and manage Azure Local updates directly in Azure Update Manager, alongside other cloud resources. Select one or multiple Azure Local instances and apply updates with just a few clicks. Behind the scenes, Azure Local orchestrates moving workloads and updating each physical machine in sequence, to ensure that updates in multi-node environments are non-disruptive (workloads keep running). You always control when to apply updates.

Ready for VMs and containers

Many critical workloads run as VMs. Azure Local offers general-purpose VMs with flexible sizing and configuration options to meet your application requirements. Specify the specs, networking, and storage you need, and either bring your own custom VM image or conveniently access ones from the Azure Marketplace. 

Secure by default

Azure Local is deployed with a hardened infrastructure security posture by default.

To help you detect and correct drift over time, Azure Local integrates with Microsoft Defender for Cloud. This provides unified security tooling for all your resources, across cloud regions and distributed locations, and can protect against existing and evolving threats.

The Extended Security Update (ESU) program enables you to get important security patches for legacy Microsoft products that are past the end of support. Getting ESU through Azure Local comes with additional benefits and implementation steps. For details, check Extended Security Updates (ESU) on Azure Local – Azure Local | Microsoft Learn

Trusted launch is a security option that hardens VMs against malware-based rootkits and boot kits. Trusted launched VMs get a virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) that enables Secure Boot and guest OS features like BitLocker data encryption. vTPM state is seamlessly preserved when the VM moves around the Azure Local cluster, enabling live migration and automatic failover.

How to Get Started

You can download the latest Azure Local OS image for your deployment. Simply follow the workflow in the Azure Government portal to create your Azure Local instance. Customize your deployment based on your needs, including cluster configuration, networking, and storage options. Azure Local empowers government agencies to harness the power of distributed cloud infrastructure with confidence and ease. 

Conclusion

Azure Local in public preview for Azure Government represents a significant step forward in enabling secure, scalable, and efficient distributed cloud infrastructure for government customers. By combining the power of Azure Arc with on-site operational control, Azure Local ensures that agencies can meet their unique needs while benefiting from a unified cloud experience.

We encourage government customers to try out Azure Local during the public preview and explore how this solution can transform their infrastructure operations. Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements as we continue to innovate and expand capabilities to support your mission-critical goals.