2.1 Core Azure Architectural components

Question 1

What is a GEOGRAPHY in Azure?

Answer 1

Boundary, often times that of a country, that have regulations for data handling.

Many companies are more comfortable when their data resides within the geography which they operate.

Question 2

How are GEOGRAPHIES divided in Azure?

Answer 2

Geographies are broken into two or more regions (hundreds of miles apart). EX In the USA there is a Western, Eastern, Southern, and Eastern region.

Question 3

In Azure, what is a regional pair?

Answer 3

A logical boundary containing two regions within the geography.

Question 4

How does Microsoft perform updates to Azure?

Answer 4

Updates are performed on one region of a regional pair at a time. This ensures no service disruptions.

Question 5

How and why should you deploy resources redundantly in Azure?

Answer 5

Deploy resources redundantly within regional pairs. Regions are separated by hundreds of miles. This protects from natural disasters.

Question 6

What does an Azure region contain?

Answer 6

Each region has a datacenter and operates its own network infrastructure for low latency.

Question 7

Are availability zones available for all Azure regions?

Answer 7

No

Question 8

What do availability zones provide?

Answer 8

High availability and fault tolerance.

Question 9

How many availability zones are in each region?

Answer 9

There are at least 3 availability zones in each region. Each availability zone has its own datacenter

Question 10

Do all services support availability zones?

Answer 10

No. Availability zones support infrastructure components.

Question 11

Name at least three Azure services that support availability zones.

Answer 11

Question 12

What do availability sets allow you to create?

Answer 12

Availability sets allow you to create two or more virtual machines in different physical server racks in an Azure datacenter. Microsoft has a 99.99% availability for its SLA.

Question 13

What two service categories support availability zones?

Answer 13

zonal services and zone redundant services.

Question 14

What is a ZONAL SERVICE?

Answer 14

Services such as VMs, managed disks, public IP address used in VMs.

Explicitly deploy zonal services in two or more zones for maximum availability.

Question 15

What happens when you create a virtual machine in Azure and deploy it to an availability zone?

Answer 15

Azure automatically deploys the managed disks and public IP address to the same availability zone.

Question 16

What is a ZONE REDUNDANT service?

Answer 16

Services such as zone redundant storage and SQL Databases. You must specify the option to make these services redundant.

Question 17

What is a RESOURCE GROUP?

Answer 17

It is a logical container for Azure services.

Question 18

What benefits does a RESOURCE GROUP offer?

Answer 18

You can deploy and manage as a single entity all of the Azure services associated with an application.

Question 19

What is an ARM template?

Answer 19

Azure Resource Management template.

Designed mostly for single resource groups.

Question 20

Can you have an Azure resource in multiple resource groups?

Answer 20

No. But you can move a resource from one group to another group.

Question 21

What does AUTOMATION SCRIPTING do?

Answer 21

It generates an ARM template that can be used to deploy all Azure resources that are connected to a resource group.

Question 22

What are the Azure “limits” (quotas) for Azure Storage accounts, Virtual Machines, and Resource Groups?

Answer 22

250 Azure Storage accounts per region
25000 VMs per region
980 Resource Groups across all regions

Question 23

In an Azure account, under the Overview blade, what can you view?

Answer 23

You can see spending data for the Azure subscription.

Question 24

What are MANAGEMENT GROUPS in Azure?

Answer 24

Management groups are a convenient way to apply policies and access control to Azure resources. It is a container for organizing resources. Can only contain Azure subscriptions or other management group.

Question 25

How many MANAGEMENT GROUPS can you have total?

Answer 25

10000

Question 26

How many levels can a management group hierarchy have?

Answer 26

6 levels

Question 27

Can you have multiple parents for a single management group or subscription?

Answer 27

No.

Question 28

What is AZURE RESOURCE MANAGER (ARM)?

Answer 28

ARM is a service that runs in Azure that is responsible for all interaction with Azure services.

• ARM authenticates you when you create a new Azure service
• Talks to resource provider

Question 29

How does ARM use DECLARATIVE SYNTAX?

Answer 29

When using Azure, Azure tells ARM what you want to do, and ARM completes the task for you.

Question 30

What does ARM use to complete a request using DECLARATIVE SYNTAX?

Answer 30

ARM uses ARM Templates which are files encoded using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).

Question 31

Name four benefits of Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

Answer 31

1) Allows you to deploy multiple Azure resources simultaneously
2) enables the reproduction of any deployment with consistent results
3) lets you use declarative templates (ARM templates) for deployments rather than writing and maintaining deployment scripts
4) enables dependencies to allow resources to deploy in the correct order every time

Question 32

Does a resource group store metadata?

Answer 32

Yes, it stores metadata about the resources

Question 33

What can a resource group contain?

Answer 33

It can contain all resources for a solution or only the resources that the user wants to manage as a group.

Question 34

How many resource groups can an Azure resource reside in?

Answer 34

Only one resource group

Question 35

What is a resource group?

Answer 35

A logical container for Azure services.