Azure Lighthouse
Microsoft recently GA’d Azure Lighthouse but what is it?
Azure Lighthouse essentially provides an easy way for people managing infrastructure in multiple Azure AD tenants. That’s mostly partners, it could help a few customers (with multiple tenants) but for the sake of ease in this writing I’ll refer to them as partners.
Partners have designed their way around the challenge of managing infrastructure in multiple tenants and I’ve seen various designs. Such as, guest accounts or partner users created in customer tenants, service principles, 3rd party tools and more. This creates challenges around identity, auditing, security, compliance, etc and doesn’t really lend itself well to automation so the main cost to partners is time. Automation is key for partners and really what I spend allot of my time driving with them. If you’re not automating as much as possible then you’re going to be left behind in the years ahead. This is where Azure Lighthouse comes in and essentially allows a partner to manage customer infrastructure from the partner tenant (as if it’s their own) without logging out or switching tenants.
It doesn’t matter how the partner is managing resources (CLI, PowerShell, HTTP request, Azure Portal) and it doesn’t matter how the customer is buying Azure (PayG, EA, CSP, etc) either. This is all because Azure Lighthouse is new functionality built into Azure, not outside or added on. With Azure Lighthouse the partner can now automate and scale cloud management allot easier than before and also work with any customer or even another partner. From the customer side they may have several partners involved, each managing separate resources/services and they can see which partner is doing what as it’s all audited.
Figure 1: Azure Lighthouse Benefits
Azure Delegated Resource Management is the foundational fabric that projects the customer resources into the partner tenant. So to the partner, it looks like and pretty much acts like the resources are actually in their tenant.
Figure 2: Before Azure Lighthouse
Figure 3: Using Azure Lighthouse
This is going to be a game changer for Azure Partners and same them lots of time.
In the following posts we’ll explore some benefits of Azure Lighthouse involving automation, governance, security and more.
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