By Simon Sharwood
Publication Date: 2026-04-30 06:59:00
Microsoft has given its Azure Local on-prem cloud a major makeover to make it fit for duty powering large-scale sovereign infrastructure.
The first role Microsoft assigned to Azure Local was as an on-prem option that uses the same hypervisor as the Azure Cloud, plus the Azure Kubernetes Service and software-defined storage. The product scaled to clusters of 16 nodes. Users manage it with Azure Arc, Microsoft’s cloudy tool for managing resources that run in the Redmondian cloud, on-prem, or out on the edge. Microsoft told The Register the product is suited to those who feel some workloads aren’t suitable to run in the cloud but want to use Arc for all their management needs.
On Monday, Microsoft announced a more ambitious role for Azure Local: powering sovereign datacenters that encompass thousands of servers.
A blog post explains how that’s possible: Azure Local servers can now access fiber channel…
