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Core azure concepts

Describe Azure Core Services

  • Basic understanding : Azure is cloud computing services which allows its users to run there solution on the remote hardware (Cloud) and solution maybe a website, ML models or bunch of VMs

  • Basic services are - Computing Power and Storage, and it follows pay-as-you-go pricing model

  • Virtualization :

    • It refers to removing or separating tight coupling of hardware and OS using Hypervisors

  • Azure Services are as follows : Compute - e.g. adding VMs/Container
    Network - e.g. VPNs adn Load balancing can be one example Store - Files, Blobs, Queue and Disks Mobile - Build/Deploy/Notifications, usage of cognitive services Databases - Open source db tools Web - Build/Deploy/Scale web app IOT - Connect/Monitor/Manage your IOT asset Big Data - Run Analytics on Big Data AI - Forecast future, behavioural insights DevOps - CI/CD

  • Azure subscription can be understood like this

    • at the top level, we have Azure Account and as we go down Subscription -> Resource group and at the tail it will be resource

Public, Private and Hybrid

  • Public clouds are Internet facing and are open to everyone's use and hardware of the cloud are managed by the third party
  • Organisation have their own cloud and for that they have set up of the hardware resources
  • Hybrid consists of both the types of cloud model. For example - Azure and On-Premise model

Cloud Computing Advantages

High Availability

  • No apparent downtime based on the SLA

Scalability

  • Vertical : Adding more RAMs or CPUs to VMs
  • Horizontal : adding instances of the resources

Elasticity

  • auto-scalable environment

Agility

  • Building and deploying easily

Geo-distribution & Disaster Recovery

  • Customer will always have the best performance
  • Back and data replication

Capital & Operational Expenditure

  • Upfront cost for the hardware or the setup
  • Other is money spent on the maintenance, services and product

Computing Models

IAAS

  • Setting up hardware is already done by the Cloud Provider and then tenant is in charge configuring OS and Network
  • Benefits
    • No CapEx
    • Agility
    • Management
    • Consumption based model
    • Skills - Making the workload secure and safe
    • Cloud benefits
    • Flexibility

PAAS

  • Cloud provides manages the configuration and networking resources and cloud tenant deploy there application to the hosting environment.
  • Same benefits as IAAS, however focuses more on the Productivity

SAAS

  • Microsoft Office 365, everything is already deployed to cloud.
  • More for the software usage

Serverless computing

  • Enables developers to focus more on the application development, rest of the configuration are already taken care by the cloud provider

Azure Terms

Resource group

  • Resources are contained into groups that acts as a logical container. It can be understood as Space in Cloud Foundry Environment

Management Group

  • Manages access, policy and compliance over multiple subscription

Azure Resource Manager

  • It is the deployment and management service for Azure
  • Describe what you want to deploy
  • Role based access control
  • Tags can be used to organize the resources

Azure Regions

  • Azure organizes datacenters into regions

Regions

  • Geographical area/plane that contains multiple datacenter that are nearby and connected together with low-latency network
  • Region Pair makes Azure more reliable in the case of disaster. Other region can be used if primary region is down

Availability Zone

  • Physically separate data centers within an Azure Region
  • Zonal Services are specific to a particular zone eg. VMs, Managed Disk
  • Zonal redundant services replicates automatically across zone eg. SQL Databases
  • Availability zones are connected through high-speed, private fiber-optic networks.

Azure Region Pair

  • Each Azure region is always paired with another region within the same geography (such as US, Europe, or Asia) at least 300 miles away.
  • This approach allows for the replication of resources (such as VM storage) across a geography that helps reduce the likelihood of interruptions because of events such as natural disasters, civil unrest, power outages, or physical network outages that affect both regions at once.
  • If a region in a pair was affected by a natural disaster, for instance, services would automatically failover to the other region in its region pair.

Azure Subscription

  • Defines boundaries around Azure products, Services and Resources
  • Billing Boundaries
    • Azure generates separate billing reports and invoices for each subscription
  • Access based
    • Specific subscription for each department