On July 11, Microsoft made Azure Lighthouse generally available, promising partners far-reaching resource controls such as monitoring VM health across hundreds of customers in Azure portal and resizing multiple customer resources.

Based on Azure Resource Manager, the Lighthouse offering also comes with templates in GitHub.Azure CTO Mark Russinovich stated:

Everything relevant to Azure resource management, from the Azure portal to services such as Azure Policy, Resource Graph, Log Analytics feature of Azure Monitor, or Update Management, all honor delegated resource management. What’s more, both customers and service providers can see who took actions on the resources from the activity log, increasing accountability for both parties, with protection of the privacy of individual service provider identities.

In an email interview, MSDW heard from Gordon McKenna, a 15 year Microsoft MVP and CTO of Ensono, about the significance of Lighthouse. He explained: