Landing Zone for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure

Deploying new infrastructure can be difficult, whether you’re moving on-premises deployments to the cloud, deploying a new service into your existing architecture or starting from a completely clean slate. There are a lot of choices to make, a lot of potential pitfalls and a lot of places where you can choose to integrate with the services offered by your cloud provider. On top of that, if you’re new to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), you may not be familiar with all of the available features and extras. RHEL alone includes a number of products that you might not be aware of, such as Identity Management (IdM), RHEL system roles and don’t forget about Red Hat Insights. Then there are add-ons like Red Hat Satellite, which helps you manage the patching and lifecycle of your RHEL estate. Beyond RHEL, there is Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, a powerful automation solution that can help you deploy and maintain a large fleet with greater ease.

But how can you be expected to sort through all of the inner workings and interconnectivity of all of those products, processes, configurations and architectures? There is a lot to think about. Not just from the perspective of how to deploy these products, but also how to deploy them correctly, and in the most secure but still accessible way possible. Then there’s the question of where it makes sense to integrate with services, such as identity, hosted by your cloud provider. It can be overwhelming.

Red Hat infrastructure standard is here to help

What if someone wrote you a deployment guide that helped you identify what you needed and what made sense for your deployment and helped to show you how to deploy it? Wouldn’t that be nice? Well, I have good news. Red Hat has spent the time defining what we call the Red Hat infrastructure standard. What is it? It's a reference architecture depicting what we believe to be an ideal deployment of our software. After all, who knows Red Hat’s software better than Red Hat? Microsoft and Red Hat have worked extensively together to embrace Red Hat infrastructure standard, integrated with Microsoft Azure's Cloud Adoption Framework, and defined the Landing Zone for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure.

What is the Landing Zone for RHEL on Azure? It’s the same Red Hat infrastructure standard reference architecture but worked into the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, helping to show you where to integrate identity, security zones, isolated networks, firewalling, RHEL IdM and even security measures like DDoS protection. The Landing Zone for RHEL on Azure is designed to help save you time and money by demonstrating a deployment of Red Hat’s software in a way that meets our own best practices, as well as Microsoft Azure’s.

Where to find out more

If you would like to learn more, head over to Microsoft’s article on Landing Zone for RHEL on Azure. This article explains how the reference architecture expands into Azure infrastructure, including links to Microsoft’s own documentation, and diagrams on a proposed technology stack deployment. And then, if you’d like to learn more about how you might automate a deployment of the Landing Zone for RHEL on Azure, stay tuned for an upcoming post about the work we’ve done on turning Red Hat infrastructure standard into a series of automation playbooks that can be deployed via Ansible Automation Platform.